7Volts.com

Fanbus - cliffs baybusses

Overclockers.com

Benchtest.com

Win98/NT Command Line Shutdowns

NTC fan controller

Ethernet Cables

H2O Pump Relay

Easy Windows Tweaks

Advanced Windows Tweaks

Relay/Rheostat #2

system restore

Radeon LE hack

Scandisk

120V Relay Powerstrip

H2O cooler #2

Big Box Rebuild

22 April 2006 - Musings

Truck refused to run on Friday morning, turns out the distributor cap and rotor came apart.  For whatever reason, I dunno.  Fixed it with a spare, then bought a new one from Napa.  The distributor seems ok, so far.  Also found the intake air temperature control valve was stuck in the full hot position.  It would not retract to the closed position due to a (probably) faulty control valve.  This would explain why it was running like crap and mileage was down.  Intake air temperature had to be 100 °C which was killing the power and making the car run very rich.  Runs like a top now, makes horsepower for a change.  Still stumbles a bit on idle when warm so I will replace the idle air control valve, which I bought a spare for on Friday.

To finish the FZR I went looking for new rings and someone to mic and hone the cylinders.  The stealership wants $51 per piston for just rings.  Times 4 is $201!  Wayyy too much money.  Wiseco and some other place sell kits, for $125 a piston.  Rings included, fortunately.  Next step is to measure the ring gap on the two motors and see if I can salvage a set of rings.  Also, if I have to overbore it would mean buying a $575 piston kit for a $1000 bike.  Not worth it (again).  Purchased a battery for the Ducati too, the 16AL-A2 battery also goes in the ventures star super royalle dohingy ubercruZer, $89.  Then, the guy who fills it forgets to put the yellow cell caps back on and I do not notice until Saturday night, after they have closed.  Its on the slow charger now, hopefully that will let me run the bike out to work on occasion. 

13 April 2006 - Officially...

I am Done with academia.  My first industrial position starts in the middle of June in the bay area.  My resignation has been tendered as of this afternoon.  So the in the immortal words of that annoying dude from Monster House. DONE!

13 March 2006 - Been a While....

Well, been playing DDO again, since I have a subscription until the 5th of April.  Started with a Thief... er Rogue and quickly moved through level 2-3 in 20 h of play.  It was fun, the quality of the gameplay directly related to the people you group with.  Solo adventuring is absolutely out of the question.  Last night I was in a great group, made up of a core of four folks and two 'wanderers'.  Although I was at level 3 and most were 1-2 it was still a blast.  The rogue really is a support character; very capable of dealing their share of damage when flanking (3d6 backstab baby!).  So in conjunction with a fighter, deadly.  My kill counts constantly ranked up close to the warforged fighter.. It was a hoot.  Plus the +18 open locks and +20 disable device really helps out!  Could do with a boost in the Spot/Search areas (+10/+11).

No D&D action this past month with the exception of a short get together with Neill and Libby to roll her up a character and get a short introduction to the game.  hopefully we will be playing again shortly, like the end of the month.

Computers: nothing going on.  Everything is stable and running well.  Have not cracked the case in almost a month.  Could do with a little more horsepower on the big system and I Really need a system at work.  The main comp there is hogged by a certain postdoc who shall remain nameless.

FZR is mostly dead for good.  Pulled the valve train out of the head to reshim it and found the #3 cylinder intake right has a shim that is flattened and will not come out of the head.  Plus, there is significant damage to the cam races and bearings.  Since I have a spare head for it, might just pull the head from the original motor, clean that up and stuff it on; that will give me a chance to look at the #3 cylinder and see if there is a problem with the piston/cylinder. If there is, then hone one of the spares and put in new pistons and ..... shit.  Might as well just pull down my old motor and rebuild it again, since that is essentially what I am doing with this new one. dammit.  Need an SV650 or something...

17 February 2006 - DDO Etc

Its official, DDO is probably Not going to be a major time suck for me.  In truth, DDO is like a long, scripted single player game with some really neat chat and party forming features.  Most dungeons are not dark, dank creepy dungeon crawls.  They consist of you and five buddies running and jumping around until you smash all the @#$@##ggin crates and barrels and kill all the monsters that you uncover.  Little sneaking around, few perilous traps to find, a couple of secret doors every once in a while.  But most party members just run around looking for loot and triggers.  Not much sense of danger, just a get through this level for paht loot mentality.  Guess all the Online games are the same, just was very dissapointed in this one as it held a little more promise than others.  Now I will hold out of Neverwinternights II and Morrowind: Oblivion.

21 January 2006 - Oops!

Hmm, sometime between 2315 1/20/06 and 1110 1/21/06 persons unknown made off with some components from my car.  Kinda threw a damper into the weekend.  Not that they got much, the amp is 15 years old and the 10" subs they ripped out were BLOWN!  HAHAHA, jokes on them!  B@#$^#ds.  Cops response.... "oh, thats nice.  Call monday and file a report.  Click!"  @#$*ers.

17 January 2006 - E-Flite-II

Well, found a new top shaft at a local hobby store.  Installed in 5 min, flew it for 3 minutes before crashing and breaking the new one!  Nutz!  So, took the broken one, a little CA and some fishing nylon twine and started rebuilding and strengthening the upper hub.  Got it sorted and mostly straight in about 20 min.  Let it dry for an hour or so and then hopped it around the house for a few min.  Stability seems off, but still, not many things you can fly around the house without too much trouble!  Will strip it down tomorrow and see if I can find the wonkiness in the trim.  Probably a loose centershaft.

16 January 2006 - DDO-II & EFlight

New beta stress test for D&DOnline starting tomorrow at 5pm.  Should be fun, pre-ordered from EBGames (not that I endorse EBGames), you get some extra loot with the pre-order and access to the beta 10 days before it goes live.  :)

The eFlight RC helicopter that I got for Xmas is a great hit.  I flew it about 10 times last week in the garage at Sacto with only one (or two) little crashes and very minor damage.  Went out looking for rotor blades over the weekend and could not find any but picked up a spare battery and some motor heatsinks, two very needed additions.  Took it home, charged it up and flew it around the backyard at Saratoga.  Got a little too close to the grass and did a forward ground loop when the right front trainer skid caught on a piece of grass.  Grrr.  Broke the balance shaft on the top of the copter and did not have the time to go back to Sheldons to get a replacement.  It was a hoot to fly in a big area though, could do some maneuvers around and have a little fun with it.  At least until it hits the ground!

16 January 2006 - Post Christmas unWrapup

The Christmas list page was a nice hit.  Everyone seemed to use it and almost everyone found it useful.  Some minor changes for next year.  A more robust login and editing system is the first item; one that will prevent too much editing of others posts.  Also a mechanism for kids to login to their own account and then edit their own lists, with parent approval.  This is a bit sticky, since there needs to be some editing of inappropriate items by parents and I am undecided how to best handle it.  Think for under 12 the parents have to enter, over that and the kids can enter their own.  Interface seemed to work ok, but not with IE.  Since I have just about everyone off of IE and onto firefox, it was only a problem with one person.  I'll work on the spacing issue, probably a browser detection script with a different set of css rules for IE.  Next year there may be an update to IE so it might become CSS2 compliant for a change, erasing my problems.  Also could just add a comment system to each list, onte that would allow buyers to post comments etc.  Have to think about that a bit.

The user interface seemed to work and not many complaints about entering and editing lists.  Still, I think I would like to have individual line item additions with some check boxes next to each to give more information on the gift.  But that would take longer to enter items into the list, which would almost defeat the attractiveness of the sites simplicity.  Wonder if there is any commercial value in this, think there are other sites doing similar things...

13 January 2006 - Raptor Goodness!

The 18 Gb SCSI drive that was housing the OS on the big system was whining enormously over the past week.  Then I got an I/O error while loading up open office, uh oh!  Broke out the 36 Gb Raptor that has been sitting on my shelf for the last 14 months, ghosted the drives over and tried to get WinXP installed.  What a nightmare.  Tried booting and would get a missing .dll error.  Turns out it was the new drive not having the correct boot.ini, so tried recreating that.  No dice, still no boot.  Tried recreating the MBR on the drive which necessitated a new ghost.  Same error.  Reinstalling over the old OS would just hang at hardware detection.  Major hang, no recovery after 12h.  Ended up doing a new install on the computer, which is not really the most fun thing to do.  But, the upside is the system is noticeably faster and I managed to copy over almost 90% of the settings from the old drive.  When software is reinstalled the old setting were mostly still there.  Some exceptions, synchromagic, avg, and a few others gave me some trouble and programs with registration codes needed to be reregistered.  Not a good experience overall, but a much faster, less cluttered system is the direct result.  Having a 10K drive for booting does seem to be making a difference in boot times and program load times too.

5 January 2006 - More RAM!

Ohhh, yea baby.  Now sporting a full 2Gb of RAM in the system.  Fry's had Corsair PC3200 Value RAM CAS3 on sale for $79 after a $50 rebate.  Cheap cheap.  Makes a big difference in the system.

1 January 2006 - Happy New Year

Things of (not so) little importance to look forward to this year.  More D&D.  Battlestar Galactica season two and three.  ER, but it is getting a bit lame.  Big changes in life in May, maybe a new job and the move-in of someone important.  D&D Online, 28 Feb 2006 - a late birthday present [edit - preordered it on the 14th!].  Health, happiness and friends too!  Have a great new year! -P

22 December 2005 - Computer News!

Yes, there is actually news on the computers!  I upgraded a couple of months ago to new video card, a Sapphire X800 GTO2, which evidently is just a X850 XT PE with four pipelines in the core turned off in BIOS.  Flashed to BIOS with a newer X850 one, and low and behold, 16 pipelines in the GPU.  Works much faster in games, Like Noticeably faster!

19 December 2005 - DDO

Hehe.  Played around in the D&D Online open beta this past weekend, it was a kick in the pants!  Made a Thie.. er... rogue and managed to get up to level 2 before they turned the servers off.  Definately one to put onto the books for future purchase.  Would be a lot of fun with a group of dedicated people to for a serious party with!  Many of the scenarios were too much for a solo person, especially when out of CLW's!  A Cleric would have a better chance of survival over a long term (solo at least) and would still be a lot of fun to bash zombies while clanking around in plate mail!

The Christmass list page I put up seems to be working well.  No complaints so far and some good suggestions for improvements next year.  Should be able to integrate it easily into the new news system for 2006 but still need a photogallery and some way to post pictures into pages/news items for the new system to work well.  In the new year!

1 December 2005 - Friggin AOL

As one or two of you may know, GAIM stopped working for me about 5-6 weeks ago.  No warning, the connection just dropped off and would not reconnect.  At the time I thought that the account might have been hacked and I was probably right; my AOL member profile was for a 20yo/single/female with a link to a porn site.  Anyway, changed the pass to something new and could still not get into GAIM.  Tried Trillian, no dice with any AOL account.  So today, determined to sort it out, I hunted down some common problems with no luck in solving the issue.  Tried typing in my AOL pass with no capital letters... and it @#($ing connected.  What a POS.

29 November 2005 - @#$@#&*

Merck is laying of 7000 people.  Half of those will be in the US.  Gleaning information from the press releases it sounds like it will mostly be admin and research staff.  Oh, great.  Is the bitterness coming through yet?

Good news is that the chlorination is up to 75.2% with ultra pure material.  What sucks is that the purification of the starting material is difficult with only 20-40% recovery, so you are damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Firefox 1.5 is out and it works smoother than 1.0.7 IMHO.  Not many changes really in the basic functionality, but it gives you control over the interface to a larger degree than before.  Still highly recommended.

23 November 2005 - Pre T-Day

C&E News (chemical and engineering news), the chemistry industry trade publication, put out its latest forecast for job growth and the current state of hiring in the industry.  Basically, it's dismal.  The industry foundered five years ago, hiring has not returned to pre-2000 levels and "show no signs of recovery."  It was a very strange article, they talk that the market is dismal and show the numbers to back that information up.  Then it segue into individual companies; all but one said that they were hiring more this year than last!  I would like to know where?  Here in the US?  No.  India?  Europe?  China?  I think the original assessment is correct; the market sucks, and big pharma and biotech is spinning a bad situation to prevent the underlying sector weakness from interfering with public perception and stock price.  Come on!  The market Sucks!  Most of sample companies said jobs are present for qualified graduates then go on to say qualification is a degree from an 'Ivy League' school!  Well, WTF!  Of COURSE there will always be jobs for the top 75-100 Ph.D.'s produced every year!  But what about the remaining 700+ candidates?  Bet not many are getting hired leaving a larger and larger pool of underemployed or unemployed, highly trained chemists on the sidelines.  Give me a break.

19 November 2005 - It's dead Jim.

Bought a compression tester today, a nice unit actually.  Pulled the plugs from the FZR, the numbers speak for themselves.

Compression (psi)
Cylinder 1	Cylinder 2	Cylinder 3	Cylinder 4
122	138	028	173

That is not a typo, #3 has 28 lbs of compression.  That is the end for the FZR I think.  After 12 years of ownership, three motors and 63,000 miles under the tires, one minor crash it is time for retirement.  Unfortunately, this means that I will probably not ride the Ducati anymore either.  I am just not good enough to keep the skills in adequate tune to ride it.  The Ducati demands a sharp, practiced rider who is well aware of the bikes faults and peculiarities.  I relied on the FZR to keep those skills in focus.

Crap.

18 November 2005 - Not going to mention motorcycles once...

Computers are so boring these days... there is absolutely nothing going on with them and me at the moment.  Of course being broke and drooling over an XBOX360 is not helping.

On a very side note, the new D&D campaign is going well.  Had three meetings so far and I have successfully killed the first BBEG (Big, Bad Evil Guy).  Can you say Sneak Attack with point blank shot!  Heh, 1d6+1 + 2d6.  I know we are kinda wimpy, but when you roll 25 to hit on the dude, your are putting the smack down on him.  This guy was the riverboat captain who was supposed to drop us off in town, but dumped us in the middle of the night at a ruined tower in the middle of nowhere.  He then conjures up some bugs which give us some trouble but I manage to put an arrow into the jerk anyway.  Anyway, this is a regular biweekly session that I found through the Sacto D&D meetup group.  Very normal people playing in the game, so I am having a bit of fun.  Turns out I like playing Thieves... er Rogues.  Even managed to do some thieving, er, lockpicking and not setting off traps!  The best thing was running across the roof of the ruined tower, slipping (failed balance check) and falling (missed reflex save) followed by a 24 on the tumble check so I took no damage from the fall!  We all had a good laugh about slipping, falling and then doing a somersault in midair and landing with a little pirouette (followed by shooting someone, but who is counting!).  Much fun.

Received the Order of the Stick comic book the other day, "On the Origins of the PC."  What a hoot!  If you have not read it and are a D&D fan it is very funny!  There is a link to the right if you are interested, or just click on the icon, that will take you to the same place.

Other than that, usmollards.com is totally on the back burner until I can get some sit down time with it.  It works, but the user reg and login system could use some hardening and simplification.  Found a great example in one of my books, will use that instead of the current one.  It will require some modification to fit the application, but no worries.

14 November 2005 - Bits n Pieces...

Took the Ducati with me to the class, with the new stock pipes mounted.  Its quieter... and absoultely dead under 8K rpm.  New battery lasted 6 exercises out of 9.  Had to slum it on a loaner bike for the last two exercises.. uggh  heh!  Ducati actually runs pretty good when the battery is charged.  Had a scare on Saturday with it though.  Took it up to Alice's Resturant to blow the dust off and on the way back the generator light went on.  This was with the old Yuasa battery so I swapped it for the freshly charged BatteryBastard unit.  While poking around under the battery notice what looks like a melted connector.  On closer inspection it was found that the alternator wires leading into the voltage regulator had corroded to the point where the insulation was flaking off the wires - the connector and the wires on the alternator side were absolutely cooked.  Off to the autoparts store for some 14 gauge wire and some connectors.  Crimped on some new wires and connectors and took off for a spin.  Much to my dismay the alternator light was still on, up until I started Floggin the crap out of the motor on the back side of Pierce.  Then the light went off - guess it needed to be run at 9K for a couple of mintues!  Anyway, that was the end of the dilema, put the bike back on the battery charger in anticipation for Sunday.  

Up at 7, out of the house at 7:35.  The class is on Leigh ave, no problem, right off of 17 there looks to be an exit from 85... Uhh, no.  No exit from 85 to Leigh ave... I get down to Blossom Hill, pull of and call for directions, since I have now really messed it up.  Find out that there IS NO EXIT ON 85 for Leigh.. the Closest is Union or Camden Ave's.  So I book it back up 85, now late for the class... and the letter said 1 minute late and Your Out of the class.  Blow down to Camden, over the freeway, poke around some backstreets, find Leigh Ave go blazing up.. right by the parking lot entrance.  Hook a wickedly illegal u-turn and into the lot.  Fortunatly, they waited to start for me! Thanks!

First exercises were just basic weave around cones, over a 2x4" - throttle control and balance issues.  Then up to braking.. from 20 mph.. yawn.  Then into a little cornering and avoidance techniques.  By the time we got to the avoidance techniques, which is something I really wanted to do on the ducati, the battery had expired.  Takes too much juice to turn over 12:1 compression cans when you stand around at idle all day and the anemic charging system will not even start to put energy back into the system until 3200 rpm.  Most of the time we spent idling around.

Overall rating: OK but dissapointed.  A skills fresher is fine but I found it not very useful.  Although it did point out that I tend to look down in corners, could use a little more practice at quickstops, have a nasty tendancy to brake too late (which you can get away with on the Ducati and FZR) and the Ducati has the turning radius of a hippo; most of which I already knew were issues with my riding.   What I really was looking for was a serious discussion on collision avoidance, lane position stratagies, handling terrain problems - camber, debreis, small furry woodland creatures, gravel - panic braking from 50 mph+, avoiding traffic trouble spots, attention-concentration and mental techniques for focus, traction control under normal and adverse conditions limits etc. etc.  I really need a very advanced, high level course taught by a professional, daily rider - read CHP officers or m/c delivery persons.  This felt like the 'basic' course without the pandering, because we were 'experienced' riders.

Let me tell you, I was not the best rider by far, but I was nowhere near the worst (but I had the smallest Chicken Strips!).  Some people have absolutely No business being on a bike, and at least 1/4 of the class that fit into that category.   Experience would probably put me in the upper 1/2 of the class, 12 years on the street - while some have only been Riding for six months.  Another thing that bugged me was one or two riders was clearly very tense when riding.  I managed to corner one and suggested that they bend their elbows and loosen up.  Like physically take your hands off the bars and shake your torso to loosen up the tightness.  No wonder they do not feel comfortable and find themselves tired after a short stint in the saddle.. loosen up!  Relax a bit and everything comes easier.  Being too tense translates into Handlebar Grip-o-Death which causes you to overcontol the bike and it really effects how the bike handles.  That was one of the biggest dissapointments, was that the instructors, who did a good job, did not catch some obvious signs of discomfort and work with those people a little bit more.

Enough!  Ducati is back on the charger and the stock pipes are comming off!  There is a bad headshake in the front end at 45-35 mph, which is especially pronounced under moderate braking on downhill off camber corners.  Scared the poopie right out of me.  Think it is related to the smack the bike took by someone backing into it.  I swore that a rotor got warped, and now the brakes really do feel like there is a warped rotor.  Of course, finding a headshake can be a bugger - the wheel is straight, the forks straight, the triple clamps are OK as are the wheel bearings and speedo drive.  Brake Rotors... maybe I can float them as a temporary measure to extend their life a bit.  Do the same on the FZR.. oh, wait, have 'new' stock rotors for that... I'll fix the tpyo's tomorrow... zzzzz

10 November 2005 - II

I surrender.  Seriously, thwarted at my attempt to get more battery acid I decided to toss in the towel.  The FZR does not run well enough to take out of the garage and the Ducati's a basket case.  Although it runs.  So, I will come home tomorrow after work, see if the pipes are here.  If they are, and I manage to get some battery acid I will make an attempt to reinstall the stock pipes and get the bike started and running.  Otherwise.  Screw it.

10 November 2005

Think I solved the #3 cylinder problem.  That is the cylinder where there is a vacc takeoff for the smog, which was not capped off well allowing a significant air leak.  Replaced the intake boot with one from a donor motor.  The #3 plug was definately lighter than the others, meaning either leaner or not firing as much.  Fiddled with the spark plug boots, thinking there may be a problem with a coil.  However, replaceing the boot gets the bike to fire almost immediately on full choke.  The air/fuel mix is still off.  The tank went back on, the rear wheel aligned, the chain reinstalled and it was rolled out, started it up, put it in gear... Promptly dies.  Repeat x2.  Grrrr, @#$#!**#&^#$% sidestand switch.  Back to the garage, sure enough the sidestand switch is non-op.  Solder a jumper over it.  Bastard.  Still think the radiator is popped but it will take a significant heating to get it truly diagnosed.  Tomorrow night, hopefully can get home early to work on it, ride it around a bit (air for tires, some good gas, check the brakes - seem to work just fine) before 10 pm. Also now have what looks like a V&H header with a big ding in it.  The bikebandit.com order came in today too, so if I get Reeeaaal ambitious I may even synch the carbs.  Still desperately need to futz with the jetting.  Sears had battery acid for the new ducati battery, bought a package, $3.75.  Filled the battery... about 3 oz. too little.  ARRRRGGGHHHHH!

7 November 2005

OK, the #3 cylinder on the FZR is having a little bit of trouble.  I am convinced this is probably the plug or plug wire as there is absolutely Nothing wrong with the carburetor.  Ordered a new battery, carb synch tool and 110 mains from bikebandit.com for arrival Thursday.  Just need some battery juice and the ducati is good to go, although it will still be very loud.  I do not think the FZR will be working for the class this weekend, so the deafening ducati it is.  Might jump on ebay and see if I can get a set of pipes for the weekend.

Finally got a good yield on the chlorination, the reaction that has been my nemesis.  Almost 65% this time around, but it was very strange.  The starting material was contaminated with ET3N•HBF4 to the tune of ~40% by NMR.  I do not get it.  Getting teeth fixed this month and next, which is proving to be an interesting experience.  I will not go into the gory details, but suffice it to say it has not been a pleasant experience on my wallet and my mouth.  The only good thing about it is that I lost about ten pounds.  And, I found out that I kinda like eating soup with some bread.

I did do some work on the new usmollards.com, but I am so rusty with the PHP that getting anything done is a bit on the slow side.  Have to figure out joins and left joins in SQL again, work on the syntax issues too.  Mostly the work was on the back end, giving the admin the ability to delete stories and users from the database.  Next I will work on the front end a bit, figure out how to get people to insert pictures into their stories and get them displayed.  Ideally the picture would be uploaded, a thumbnail created, then they can add the thumbnail to the story along a gallery which people can click on and see a larger version of the picture itself.  Now that is going to have to wait I think, first just get the pictures into the story would be a good starting place.  Am thinking that I need to go back and rework the login system, there are too many pages and it seems overly complex.  Might work back to one I saw in a book, which was much simpler and allowed you to put different user levels in and deny access based on level using an admin.php script on each directory.  Ado.

3 November 2005

And, the FZR actually sort of runs too.  Got it firing regularly on full choke when cold, off choke when warmed up a bit.  Had to increase the idle fuel/air to 2.5 from 1.5, which was way too lean.  2 had it choking a bit, hanging on RPM return to idle so it obviously needed a little more fuel.  Put 112 mains back in in anticipation of the new pipes in a couple of weeks.  Will have to find some 110 Mikuni jets somewhere, may just order them from bikebandit.com along with a new Ducati battery.  Looks like the radiator may have a pretty good sized leak in it but it might just be some extra liquid boiling off.  Suspicious about the waterpump too.  Either way, going to button it back up tonight, get the chain on, realign everything, adjust the clutch, bleed the brakes, air the tires and see if I can get it to go down the street.  New pipes on the way too - should be here next week but will need some repairs before they can be used.  For $25, a bargain.  Running out of time on the FZR, need to have it running good, reliably this weekend as my school is on the 12th.  If it looks marginal, then I will have to take the Ducati, oh darn.

Computer is still chugging along.  No work on usmollards.com this week yet, maybe on Sat night or Sunday.  Although I am kinda getting the itch to do some D&D preparation.  Definitely a session on Tuesday for the new campaign and possibly another on the 12-13th at Saratoga.  Pogio.com has some old WotC material available for download for like $5/book.  May just go ahead and get a new source book to have around for background material.

29 October 2005

It LIVES!  Thats right, see a fat man on a small motorcycle - that's me!  FZR now idles roughly, runs up to about 8K before falling flat on its face due to a too lean mainjet.  No unusual noises, oil leak appears to be very minor and the water leaks were evidently just a loose bolt.  Hooked up the rear wheel, ran it into first gear which proved successfull.  Everything needs adjusting - clutch, front brakes, rear brakes etc etc.  Had to knock off early though, the CO levels were getting me rather rosy cheeked!  Ducati runs too, noisily! (but how sweeet the sound!)  I'll pick up some new gas for the FZR tomorrow - might be part of the poor running problem - while I am out trying to get the lawnmower working at the other house.  If fortune holds, I may make a brief foray out into the world to put air into the FZR and ducati tires and to top the tanks off - oh, wait.  Don't get paid until Tuesday... grrr.

Going PHP here soon - have the script running on the test server.  It will make it easier from my end, I can log into the site and put up logs whenever, instead of manually typing it into HTML, formatting it and then uploading it to the server as static HTML.  Might as well, eh?

Plan is to put in two weeknights into usmollards/goingone.com for the next two months.  I would like the script/comment engine running on usmollards for t-day so that coordinating christmas lists is a little less work for me this year.  Better to have Others do the work...  It is nothing fantastic, just a multi page site with some variations on a basic news item/comment theme.  File uploads/downloads are working but have to figure out how to handle pictures and letting people display them in the comments.  And comment logo's too.  Keep it simple - make changes later!

And, yes Karl, you can link to this page from yours!  Hope you won some $ in LV!

28 October 2005

D&D was a couple of weeks ago, a semi-successfull session.  Nowhere near the amount of progression that I expected, the party got a bit fractured and spent too much time farting about.  Next session will be the BBEG (or BBUG) encounter then extraction from the dungeon and back to town.  Hopeing that T-day or Christmas will bring a couple of big sessions where we can make some progress into the campaign.  Lord Rullyn is probably a little pissed that it has been almost a month since he sent the party out...

FZR - started but will not run on anything but full choke.  This bike has always been a bit lean at the bottom for some reason.  Bumping the floats to 24 mm from 21mm has not helped either, nor the 108 mains.  Going to pull the carbs again and put in 110's, attach and adjust the EXUP system and rebleed the brakes.  There is a massive oil leak just under #4 (left side, outer) cylinder.  Looks like a cracked case or something.  I cannot find any source for the leak but the mating surface of the lower and upper case halves or the cylinder base gasket.  Either one will require a complete motor stripdown.  Ducati battery is Dead - $90 for a new one.  Called my mechanic Trevor at SB Pro Italia to see if he had a set of stock exhaust pipes for my 916.  If I have to do the MSF course on the ducati, that will not be a problem but I really do not want to be there with the D&D open pipes that are on there at the moment.  Way too loud.  Going to get slamed at that meeting for my 10 year old helmet and old, wornout jacket that is too small for me.

20 October 2005

Ohhh, the smoothness of a fast video card!  SW: Battlefront works great at 1280x1048 with AAx2.  Get my ass kicked 90% of the time on hard, have yet to do some online play.  As usual I expect my butt will get kicked there too.  Fun to snipe the Ewoks!

Have not worked on the FZR or the computer other than the new MB last week.  the FZR is getting more and more critical though.  Since the carbs are already out, thought I would start on them tonight, pulling the emulsion tubes, setting 25 mm of float height and cranking the air/fuel mix to 2-2.5.  This is a concensus starting place for jetting with 110 mains and will have to play with the jetting, as always.  D&D last weekend.  Session update is in process of being written up and I have not opened the box to do the exp.  Probably will not be much.. too many characters for good exp gains.

14 October 2005 - More Musings

Here I am, sitting at work, not working, thinking about how much better the RDC connection is to my computer these days.  I replaced the SMC WBR7004 with a linksys WRT54G earlier this week, updated the bios in the linksys, turned on WPA to get rid of that annoying person who keeps ganking my bandwidth and set the MTU size to a better value.  What a difference in download speeds; used to max at about 400 kbs from various sites, now I am seeing 1100-850 kbs as more realistic numbers.  Even grabbed service pack 2 for XP from somewhere, a 260 Mb download, in under 10 minutes.  Nice!  Although I must say the connection from work sucks because the network here is a complete POS.  No control, all higgeldy piggeldy in bandwidth.  Sometimes you get tons-o-bandwidth, other times (lunch, 1530-1730) you get nothing but stutters and spits.  I must admit RDC is not exactly a bandwidth hog, especially at 56Kb settings, but still, it should run almost effortlessly over this connection, 100% of the time.  

Finally had a little time last night to do some gaming on the computer.  Nothing taxing, just a little SW Galactic Battlegrounds at 1280x1024.  With the 9600 and the Barton 2500+ it would stutter quite a bit with five other players on hard settings.  Especially when the mob rush was on at the 28 minute mark.  Now, I get wiped off the map in record time, with silky smooth game play.  No more stuttering.  Tonight might get a little bit of SW Battlefront in, bought that game when I upgraded the system but have not installed it yet.  I wanted to flash the ATI Sapphire X800 GTO2 up to an X850 XL PE since according to the hardware it is the right one, before doing any FPS games.  Going from 12 to 16 pipelines and a bump in GPU speed and memory timings will make it run much faster.

New emulsion tubes for the FZR along with a shift indent kit for the tranny were on the desk at home yesterday.  Woot! Jetting woes are going to go away!  Just noticed that the FZR has a pretty bad oil leak in the pan gasket and the Ducati battery will not take a charge at all.  One of these days I will actually get around to fixing the last of the problems from the FZR motor swap and start doing shakedown rides.  Deadline of 13 Nov is looming, need to have it shook out by then as I have an MSF course arranged for that date.  Think the front brake calipers are up for disassembly and cleaning this time around too.  There is the possibility that the warpage in the rotor is just a sticky caliper piston.  Either way, have a set of rotors to replace the Braking rotors that are on there at the moment.

13 October 2005 - More

Things are now working smoothly on the computer for the most part.  System seems stable under 'normal' operations, CPU is running 30 °C, +5 over case temp.  No games on it yet, that will hopefully be in the near future.  Still surprised that the system was running from the D: drive, and not the C: as was originally thought.   Brings up an interesting question, whether or not to mirror the D: to the Raptor then leave the C:/F: drives alone and move the noisy 18 GB SCSI out of the case.  Have to ponder that for a few days.

Some fun quotes from the National Acadamies.

1. In 2001 U.S. industry spent more on tort litigation than on research and development.
2. For the cost of one chemist or one engineer in the United States, a company can hire about five chemists in China or 11 engineers in India.

I am so totally in the wrong business.  This is depressing.  The death of scientific intellectualism and intellectualism in general in this country has been ongoing and long.  And the rate is only increasing due to attacks on education by fundamentalist Christian organizations promoting things like 'intelligent design' (I can hear the Europeans and the rest of the world laughing from over here!) and the hamstringing on genetic research by the current administration.  If we are not the best, most qualified country to ethically pursue these research areas then what is that really saying about the state of science, morality and the country in general.  Instead, the dumbass in office kowtows to the Christians to appear moderate letting the world jump ahead!  Read the history books here folks... the reason we have enjoyed 35+ years of exceptional growth and stability is due to the R&D efforts put into getting to the moon!  The country was founded on new ideas, new technology and exploration of boundries.  Stop now only at our peril!  In a couple of years, when Europe and China and India have far exceeded us in terms of research and they are leading the way intellectually and industrially, we will be going their way, not ours, as a second rate has been (read England since 1870's).  Who then will sell us oil because we will no longer be able to afford it.

12 October 2005 - Late night Ho Humm

Computer crashed today, quite unexpectedly.  Was working and it froze.  Reset failed to bring the system back up so I popped open the case and started poking around.  Found a deformed capacitor, probably from the 'bad cap' supply in Taiwan a couple of years ago.  Went to Fry's to grab a DFI Lanparty MB and an 90 nm AMD64 3000+ along with a new wireless router for the house.  Ouch, was not cheap.  And, the AMD64 chip was open box (grr) and all the DFI boards were open box too.  Ended up with a Gygabyte K8NPRO-SLI which was cheaper than the K8NUltra and only missing a second gigabit Ethernet card, some SATA slots, 8.1 sound vs 7.1 and a set of firewire and USB outlets.  For $40, who cares!  Eight USB 2.0 ports and two 1334 (firewire) slots will cover me nicely.  I should be able to get the MB warrantied, since this was a recall item anyway.

The AMD was indeed used, had been out of the case and the heatsink installed.  Scraped off the thermal pad, some Artic Silver paste and into the MB it went.  Installed the ram, re imaged the C: drive onto the Raptor and installed everything.  Went in easily, but getting the OS up and running was a bitch.  Turns out the comp was running the OS off of the D: drive, a 7.2K RPM 18Gb SCSI-III Seagate.  Baffled me for hours!  Ended up finally getting the OS to boot, reinstalled and after 12 h a usable screen.  So far I am not impressed with the speed, seems about as fast as my 2500+ and maybe a tad slower than when it was at 3200+ via overclock.  Good news is this revision of chip has a lot of headroom for overclocking.  When I go back on water, 2.2 Gb (4000+) should be a reasonable target on stock voltages.  Would like to get the OS back onto the C: drive, but I may just image the D: onto the Raptor and see if that will run as the boot drive.  The ATI 800 GTO2 from Sapphire I picked up (again used!) from Newegg also went in, since the new MB is PCIx not AGP.  ATITool reports it is the correct revision for a bios flash to 16 pipelines.  So far I have not even started a game with it though!  Did pick up a copy of SW: Battlefront to poke around with while at Fry's.  All in all, no major improvements from a $250 investment.  Very dissapointed.  Next might get a copy of M$ 64-bit OS, but until it gets more stable will stick with the standard XPPro version.

Also got a new wireless router, Linksys WRT54G.  Seems to be working good, nice to have a 63 bit WPA encryption key on the wireless for a change, give me that oh so secure feeling.  That was an easy install, tough to find out what version it was, so I guessed it was a v.4 since the stock bios was 1.30.7, a revision listed on the website for the v.4 but not the v.3 or v.5.  Flashed it up to 4.2 something and the settings are much more comprehensive.  Both systems are out on the net, but the netgear print server is having some troubles but that will be for tomorrow, too late tonight to worry about it.

Ducati battery is shot, will not take a charge while the cheap $23 battery from costco in the FZR charged up almost immediately!  $75 for a new Ducati battery, not this month.  Have to get on the ball and finish the FZR by the 13th of Nov., managed to get into the MSF experienced rider course in San Jose and will obviously need a bike to participate.  Looks like almost everything is ready to go, so just have to get the carbs on and figure out what is causing the misfire - just like my truck!

4 October 2005

Never did sort out what was going on with GAIM.  Still cannot get it to connect to AIM, trillian will not either.  Tried reverting to 1.2.0 and uninstalling GTK+ 2.9.6a and reverting back to a previous version with no success.  Very strange, now I have to use AIM with all the crappy interface junk that goes along with it.

Nothing on the computer front other than that.  Been arranging all my stuff in the garage, was thinking of picking up a sweeet 400/600 FZR from a fellow in Reno, but I nixed that.  Need to pay off some debt first and buy a new helmet (Shoei X11-$500!), emulsion tubes (FZR, $97), shift indent kit (FZR, $45), battery for Ducati ($72) and a new riding jacket ($350).  There, almost the cost of the new bike.  Need to finish off the FZR too, it runs but not well.  Think the emulsion tube issue is catching up with me and need to clean out the carbs a little better.  It gets good fuel from the looks of it, but you never know.  Definitely too far out on the air screws, 4.5 turns!  Should be about 2-2.5.  That is the emulsion tubes though, when they wear it makes getting the midrange jetting right impossible.  Going to mount the accell coils in also, that should hot up the spark a bit too.  Truck's mileage is coming back up, seems stable at about 19.5 mpg, 1.0 off of where it was in June.  Used a product called BK44G(S)? for cleaning the injectors; it is a fuel additive.  Truck has been running better ever since.  

Going to join a D&D group here in Sacto later this month, should make my DMing better.  Also, trying to arrange a meeting with the boys for the 14-15th.  Have a new adventure to run them into, lots of options!  Working on the world a little bit at a time, but there are many other things going on and I do not get to spend the time I would like on those non-critical projects.  Resource management, baby!

22 September 2005 - Something Strange

I am ashamed to admit it, but I still have an AOL account.  In fact, it is the one I have been using for about 11 years now and is my current AIM/chat name.  Over the past few months I have made a serious effort to wean myself off of it; re-registering websites to my new address, not using the old account to send mail etc.  I am down to just 2-3 pieces of mail a week and I will probably drop the account at the end of the month.

That being the case, Tues morning about 1:15 just as I was pooping out and heading to bed, GAIM pops a message up saying that somebody else had logged onto my account.  This is my chat account and is my AOL account name.  Strange to say the least.  I booted the other login and then proceeded to go to bed, thinking it was a glitch.  Next morning GAIM had permanently disconnected at about 1:45 and would not login again even when I manually typed in the password.  My mail client had also spat out a invalid username/password error for all the AOL accounts.  Tried using the AOL client to login with no success, invalid password.  Went back to my memory and fished out all the old passwords for the AOL accounts, none worked.  Reset the password using (India based) phone support for all the accounts and finally got a successful login.  Changed the pass in GAIM and no connect.  Updated GAIM to 1.5 (recommended), still no dice.  Ok, download and install Trillian.  Same thing, no login.  Checked the proxy settings with AOL (oscar.xxx.xx.xxx) and the port looked OK on both GAIM and Trillian.   I had to resort to downloading and installing AIM and all its assorted spyware.

Surfing through the message boards shows no complaints about GAIM not connecting to AIM's oscar service.  I am starting to think my AOL account got hacked or something (Duhh, you think, eh!).  Goodness knows how.  Anal is the word my brother uses to describe me and my security paranoia.  Anyway, I am currently beefing up my security at home, remaking my PGP keys, reseting easy passwords on critical services etc.  Think I will pick up a new router for the house too, one that will let me turn off the WiFi or run WPA security on it.  I know my neighbors were ganking my connection a couple of weeks ago - bastards.

Moving this weekend, wish me luck.  Ducati to work next week, ohhh the thrill!

20 September 2005

What to say...  what to say...  Moving stuff this weekend, it will not be fun.  Fortunatly it will not be tremendously hot (I hope).  Dunno what else to say.  Nothing happening on the computer end.  Er, well, I did get the BIOS on the ASUS A7N8X-deluxe board (rev 2.0) updated.  This would enable me to boot from either the SATA or SCSI drives as a bios option.  But, do not want to screw with it at the moment, bigger fish to fry first....  Made some minor changes to this site, am working on major changes for the frontpage of usmollards.com but right now I need to do some serious research into alkyl or acylation of unactivated, doublely allylic amines.  Got some leads but no answers.

11 September 2005 - WTH is up with Fry's?

Was in fry's yesterday, perusing my options since I have many gift certificates burning a blowtorch size hole in my pocket.  Was in there for a HD, preferably a Seagate SATA with NCQ (native command queuing) since in a recent TechReport.com article they came out pretty close to the top for performance.  Need at least 160 Gb for all my crapolla.  Find a nice 300 Gb unit, $75 mail-in rebate brings it to under $0.30/Gb.  Pick it up and manage to over hear the salesperson next to me selling the wrong product to a non-geek.  Sold them a very expensive SATA drive when their older computer probably doesn't even support it.  Shook my head and walked off.  Then, back at the video card corner, listened to the sales rep give just plain False information to at least two different customers.  One I caught and said he had better pick up the AGP card and not the PCI-x card he has in his hands.  Two year old Dells do NOT HAVE PCI-X!  Jeez.  You would think that if you worked that one area, you would at least spend five minutes getting familiar with the products.  No clue as to the difference between AGP and PCI-x.  Couldn't explain the difference between an nforce 7800 and a 6600 GT.  No clue as to if the 6600 GT would output HDTV signal (it was written on the box, HDTV output through something other than S-video, forget now).  But hell, I knew more than this guy and I do not pay attention to the video card scene anymore.  And the prices are creeping up.  AMD64 3000+ $159, newegg - 141.  DFI lanparty MB 189 vs 129.  No MSI motherboards or videocards, just cheaper Chaintech, ECS and the higher end ASUS, ABIT and DFI.  Disappointing to say the least.  And parking it a total bugger.  So there, I will.... not.... go...... back.... to Fry's...... Must... Resist.....

.....Resistance is Futile.....

11 September 2005 - Computer goes UUuuurrp

Bought a new HD yesterday.  300 Gb Seagate SATA with NCQ, Frys, Don't ask on the price, not bad though.  Installed, everything went peachy, no boot.  Fiddled with the wires, no boot.  More fiddling, still not booting, just lockup.  Found out the Tekram SCSI card was loose in the PCI slot, pushed it in a bit and got a good boot.  Being the ambitious sort, I figured that it was high time I dumped the 7 year old 9.1 GB SCSI-III 10K boot disk for my shiny, newish 10K 36.6 Gb WD Raptor.  Mainly because SCSI has never worked right in Winblows, the command interpreters are not right in the OS and it makes the SCSI hardware not run at optimal read/write speeds.  It is an old complaint with Winblows, one that they never saw to fix even with enterprise server OS's.  Makes no sense to me.

SATA should be faster than SCSI; the software is written better and the hardware read/write commands all work.  So, just have to ghost the SCSI drive onto the raptor and then change the boot disk in BIOS.  Get it booted from a ghost2002 floppy and after nine (9!) restarts get ghost to show the SATA drives as an option.  This is just something you cannot do with a Win98 boot disk, which far predates the SATA spec and thus there are no drivers on the boot disk for SATA.  Maybe I will have to see if there are boot drivers for it somewhere....  Anyway, ghost6 is much better than 7 IMHO (no 'enter code' annoyances).  Ghost takes 10 minutes for the entire drive at 1000+ Mb/min (that is fast for ghost!).

Boot back into BIOS, no option for booting from SATA.  WTF!  Try booting from HDD-0 to HDD-3, which are all the harddrive options, without success.  Looked on the ASUS website to see if there was a BIOS update to enable booting from SATA.  Low and behold, it states on the A7N8X Deluxe download that in bios 1006 or higher, SATA drives are added as a boot option.  Time to update the BIOS; download the latest 1008-d.bin file for the ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe board rev 2.0 (as per the boot screen) and boot into winblows 98 from a bootable CD.  Hard lock on file write.  WFT!?  Try again with the c18d1007.bin, an older bios revision, same thing, hard lock on bios write.  So grab the bios for the 1.02 version board, awdflash gives a 'not correct version' error, which is good it confirms I have a 2.0 board.  So try the non-deluxe 2.0 bios, 1010-B.bin, and it locks up again as before.  This is getting old.  Must have tried 30 different combinations of boot disk and file locations to troubleshoot it.  Turns out you need to have the awdflash.exe and the .bin file on the file system root, usually the C: drive.  Do that, no dice on the update, still hard locks on write.  At this point (3 AM), I gave up.  Figure in two+ months I will replace the board with a AMD64 board and migrate this one to my backup/webserver.  Pisses me off that I cannot use the nice new HD in my system though, what a waste.

New TPS and MAP for the truck today and it gets an oil change and a fuel filter too.  Not really 3K miles for the oil, but with it almost overheating a couple of times, better safe than sorry.

5 September 2005

New plugs and wires were installed on the truck yesterday.  Initially, I thought that there was little difference in performance.  The mileage has crept up in the past week or two possibly due to it no longer being 100+ outside and using the AC less.  I took it out for a longer spin last night, it definately pulls better and the hesitation at partial throttle was noticably reduced.  Still think I will put a new MAP (manifold air pressure) and TPS (throttle position sensor) in when I get the funds, check the fuel pump for acceptable pressure and possibly install a new accelerator pump if I can figure out what it is called in the TBI system on my truck.  Most of these are $30-40 items and can be purchased anywhere.  Also going to get some new vacuum lines, mine are getting brittle.

Going to look at a 2001 Suzuki SV650 tomorrow.  4K, a bit on the steep side, but it only has 4 K miles and a full fairing kit on it along with an aftermarket exhaust.  It will be a good commuter bike if I pick it up.  The price is a bit on the steep side and I hope that I can get him down to the 3200-3500 range.  I will need to pick up a new helmet, my old one is 10 years old now, and jacket too (don't ask why).

30 August 2005

On the computer front we replaced the laptop's 4200 rpm drive with a 7200 rpm drive.  What a difference!  Boot times used to be 4.5 minutes with the newly updated OS (XP) with the new drive, 38 seconds to a usable screen!  It was expected to make a bit of a difference, but what we saw was an enormous change in usability of the laptop.  No longer does it take 1-2 minutes to load up work/OpenOffice, it is now like 20 seconds.  Guess the message here is that even if you dump a lot of RAM in your laptop, it is still data bandwidth limited by the HD, buy a 7200 rpm unit and revive your old system.  The only downside so far is a bit more heat and shorter battery life, both are manageable though.

Truck is running a bit rough, mpg down to 17.5 at times.  It barely passed smog and the sparkplug wires were arcing all over the place.  Replaced the cap and rotor (no change) ran some SeaFoam through the carb and tank and it ran better.  Put an 8.8 mm accell wire on from the coil to distributor and fixed the coil trigger wire that was leaking voltage with no change.  After ordering them two weeks ago, I now have a new set of 8.0 mm MSD wires from Tognotti's performance in Sacto - who I Recommend you STAY FAR AWAY FROM (unprofessional clerks, poor cashier service, unfriendly service, felt like I was disturbing their chat session by buying something).  This week will finish the wire change out, put new plugs in and a new OEM coil.  If this doesn't fix it, then will replace the fuel filter again and test the existing fuel pump and throttle position sensor.

Put a new radiator in it last month along with a trans oil cooler.  Now runs 160-180 °F in rush hour traffic/city streets with the AC on and 100 °F OAT temps.  Thank goodness, I was starting to melt on the way home every night.  With end of summer heat and humidity coming up in September and October it was a good fix.  The radiator was sourced from Jags that Run and I purchased the drop in replacement radiator, Al core, 18 fins/inch ..::Linkage::..  Thought I was purchasing a 1.375" thick unit, but the one shipped was the same width as stock.  It installed very easily, a true drop in replacement part, and it works Great.  A highly recommended modification.  Also got the oil leak fixed.  Had to take it to the stealership, they found the remote oil adapter's o-ring was leaking and fixed it (for $107).  They were supposed to read and diagnose the engine error codes but they could not get the computer to talk to the EFI system.  Which sounds like BS since there are many reports on the web of just shorting a couple of jumpers and reading the error codes directly with an LED.  That's next, see what is not working right electronically and fix accordingly.  Pepboys used to read the error codes for you in the shop... will have to look at that or buying a diagnostic reader.

Looking forward to having the bikes back in my possession at the end of next month.  With gas prices hovering around the 2.75-2.80 mark, a 55 mpg bike again for my 50 mile daily commute would save me a bundle.  Need to order a few bits for the FZR; emulsion tubes, shift indent kit, oil pressure gauge (optional), needles, EXUP cables etc.  Finally got some new front brake rotors which will be a huge improvement in rideability.  Duck needs a battery ($120 ugh!) and a good thrashing :-)

Other than that, work is going.... (And I miss my wife!)

16 July 2005 - HPwitH-BP and BG Season II

Ohh, today is HP day.  Think we will pick up a copy from Fry's, where I have bought the last two.  Don't konw if I will make it to work after that; haven't had a book to read for a couple of weeks and I am pretty desperate for reading material.  The new Battlestar Galacta was out last night, so I bittorrented it since I have a copy of the show on the TiVo down in SoCal.  Just finished watching it, and I must say I am more and more impressed with the stories, characters, effects and plot lines.  Excellent TV, some of the best stuff I have seen in years.  It is so different from the original Battlestar Galactica, for good reason (original was shite).  IT may have its detractors, but what the hey, I am enjoying it throughly.

11 July 2005 - Whaa?!! A/C?

Yes, its true.  After 10 years of no usable A/C in the truck, I now have A/C!  Just in time too since it is supposed to be the normal 105 in the valley all week (uugh).  Over the weekend we got the r-12 removed and recycled, pulled the accumulator off and replaced it with a new one and added a couple of ounces of 134a ester oil.  Had to take some time off then as we needed an adapter for the vacuum pump.  Evidently you need to get all the water out of the system or you risk freezing and cracking the condenser or destroying the compressor.  Got the adapter the next morning (for $5.46 – what a rip off!) then filled the system up with ~30 oz. of 134a.  The new refrigerant went in easily and the system now seems to work, at least at night, in cold weather.  Today will be the test, its is upwards of 100 outside.  Thanks Kevin!

1 July 2005 - Generallities

Computers are doing OK.  Still have not fixed the H2O box, so everything is on air.  But, must say the new voltage regulator on the big system is working great, keeps enough air moving to cool the system and is quiet!  Purchased a laserjet 6P for $35 and put $14 worth of memory in it - 4 x 16 Mb 70 ns SIMMS, total memory 50 Mb.  Works great!  Has enough memory so that you can throw a ton of items into the queue without it choking on it.  Also have purchased a HP (See a trend) scanner with an auto-document feeder on it.  But having a hard time finding an adapter for it, need to go from my Tekram SCSI-3 interface to the SCSI-I on the scanner, its been a problem getting the right one, still looking.  Only paid $30 for the thing, no way I am going to spend $50 for an adapter to get it to work.

EDITEDNew job isn't what I hoped it would be.  It is ok, but not great.  Nice to have a job though and I am slowly making progress towards my target.  Hope to be into interesting chemistry within the next week or two, have to look at chloride reduction with hydride sources other than tin (Which I hate to work with!).SNIP!

Lots of D&D going on too, you can hit the updates on the D&D page.  I am trying to get someone to write the adventures up as we go along, but it is proving difficult to do.  I would write them up, but sometimes I just want to relax a little.  We are playing again this weekend, think I will take a smaller party through a canned adventure.  It will be fun and give some of the more junior members of the party a chance to catch up in terms of XP.  I am finding that progression through levels is a bit faster than I would like so I have cut the XP awards down by 50%.  I mean we are on our fourth and fifth session and we are approaching 3rd level already - give me a break!

It has been memorable sessions too.  I'll not soon forget Poot knocking the head off of a sleeping goblin, the head flying over the goblins' buddies, who looked up to watch it arc over them as they crouched tossing dice.  Utter shock and amazement on their faces, as an arrow form Eltsackwan flies out skewers one goblin through his upraised hand knocking the dice he was about the throw into the face of his compatriot.  The arrow continuing thought the goblins noggin and skewering the flying goblin head.  Hehe, thought that was a bit of alright there. What fun.  BTW, the other goblin thoughtfully retreated, only to be drained to a lifeless husk by a deathlock in his attempt to escape.

13 June 2005 - I want my OSX!

Finally!  Apple said last week that they will be switching away from the IBM Power PC processor (a great processer IMHO) to Intel hardware starting next year.  Think this is a 'bong' for winblows to wake up and make an OS that works, not that the bloatware that is windows now can every really be fixed.  Personally, I am going to hold off on making any major hardware purchases, if I can, until OSX for the Intel processor is released.  Once that is done I will build a box around that core hardware instead of windows.  Can't wait.

Also, my new, handbuild watercooling box has a major leak.  Havent fixed it yet, so everything is still on air.  Amazingly its all still working, but the 2500+ will no longer take an overclock at all.  Maybe next week to look at it.  I figure it is the seal on the pump, the one around the intake housing that is leaking, it has been leaking for a long time at home and the slight torque on it now might be enough to let water past the o-ring.

31 May 2005 - Will the fun never cease.  Bonk!

I Am A: Neutral Good Dwarf Ranger Thief

Alignment:
Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered 'normal'.

Race:
Dwarves are short and stout, and easily recognizable by their well-cared-for beards. They are hard workers, and adept at stonework and engineering. They tend to live apart from other races; generally in deep, underground excavated systems, and as such tend to be distant from other races.

Primary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.

Secondary Class:
Thieves are the most roguish of the classes. They are sneaky and nimble-fingered, and have skills with traps and locks. While not all use these skills for burglary, that is a common occupation of this class.

Deity:
Mielikki is the Neutral Good goddess of the forest and autumn. She is also known as the Lady of the Forest, and is the Patron of Rangers. Her followers are devoted to nature, and believe in the positive and outreaching elements of it. They use light armor, and a variety of weapons suitable for hunting, which they are quite skilled at. Mielikki's symbol is a unicorn head.

Find out What D&D Character Are You?

I know what I am, what are you?

29 May 2005 - Computer stuff

Well, finally sat down and built a LM317 based voltage regulator to handle the power requirments for the large intake fan on the Big system.  At 7V, the 120x57 mm YS-Tech behemoth fan was very noisy; with summer temps creeping up too, there was a definate need to do something about the noise without compromising the cooling in the system too much.  A 5/7/12V switch was an option, but still needed a way to turn it off.  Instead I built a more elegant LM317 based voltage regulator with parts from Radioshack.  This unit, unlike the one in the H2O box (which is another, much wetter, story) has a minimum voltage setting to keep the fan from stalling at low potentiometer settings.  Low voltage was set by a 820 ohm resistor in series with the 1K potentiometer.  With a 220 ohm reference resistor, the numbers work out to ~5.2 V at minimum pot setting, 10.4 V at the tops.  The LM317 loses ~1.5 V internally.  Built, assembled and tested in under an hour.  I am definately getting better about building these things.  Intalled it into the big system, removing a potentiometer that was controlling video card fan speed.  Do not ask me why I had one on there in the first place.

The next voltage regulator will be a PWM controller hooked to thermistors which can be set for when the fan comes on and off depending on case temps.  Not shown in the picture is the potentiometer which is a 1K unit I got from somewhere.  Clearly evident are the heatsink covering the LM317, the two capacitors to handle power variation, one of the two resistors R1 (220 ohm) and the 1N4001 diode to prevent backlash if the fans stall.  Works great, got it installed that night, at the lowest setting it does a good job keeping the case cool and you can just hear the fan humming.  Think this one is a success.

The big system is still on air cooling (stock POS AMD cooler too); Not great for temps on the CPU.  Pushes 52 °C core during the day.  Had to back it out of being overclocked, even with a slight bump in voltage, at 3200+ speeds the core was hitting 65-70 °C and the system started to get flakey, crashing under medium CPU loads.  I have the H2O box built but it failed during leak testing this weekend.  Fortunatly it just had regular H2O in it and not coolant.  Turned it off last night, came out this morning to 'drip... drip..'.  Something sprung a leak when the system was off and the water was allowed to settle into the lowest places.  The right side that houses the reservoir and pump was full of water and some had leaked out the bottom of my Well MadeTM cooling box.  My thought is that the pump output housing does not fit tight enough onto the pump case to maintain a good seal over time.  This pump leaked on the old system too but I wrote it off due to angular stress on the output housing which caused slight leakage at the case-housing joint.  One more project....

A couple of sites to help you in your quest for LM317 voltage regulators.  The MIC29152 low drop-out regulator looks like a great project too, but the microprocessor is expensive and difficult to find (Frys = no way, Raidoshack = "Your kidding, whats a micropro... wait, dont those go in computers... we have a Compaq right over here...", Quent = closed, 90% of other electronics shops = closed).

1. Fan Noise Solutions - great site
2. An OK one from CaseMods.com
3. Some Bitchin' but difficult to build ones

9 May 2005 - Motorcycles -- Feeling much better....

OK, OK.  Think the problem with the FZR is not really an issue.  Let me explain; dropped the header and carbs off and pulled the motor mounts, pivoted the motor on the rear lower bolt and took off the valve cover.  Inside was what looked like a ton of assembly lube oozing out of all the cam lobes.  Consulting with the resident vehicle guru leads me to believe that that oil contamination is just the assembly lube dissolving into the oil. Buttoned the motor back up and bolted it back into the frame.  Cleaned the carbs too, not that they looked very dirty, but after a year of sitting around thought it would be a good precaution to ensure it runs well.  Out of town for most of next week, so any more work will have to wait for a month or two.  Next is to swap out the o-rings on the back water passage to fix the leak and put everything back together and take it for a spin.  Have to sort the @^%@#$ DMV out though since it's on a NonOp.

H2O box redux (Not dexfenfluramine hydrochloride): box is just about done, four coats of polyurethane on over a stained wood, it just needs finish sanding with some 320-400 grit to bring out the grain on the wood and polish the finish up.  It is nowhere near perfect in terms of the finish, especially the staining, but it looks pretty good.  The electronics are all in and working, 2x LED's, switches, homebuilt LM317 voltage regulator for the fans, mounts for the radiator are made and the reservoir is complete.  It will not get components until I get to Sacto on Sunday, since I will have to strip down the existing box to recover fans for the new box.  I'll let you know.

Working on a new D&D adventure for a future meeting.  Looking at the weekend of the 21st for a gathering...

3 May 2005 - #@$)%@#^% Motorcycles!!!

Finally got the FZR motor into the bike, all the wires, cables hooked up, flywheel changed and installed, new front brake master cylinder reservoir mounted and the system installed and bled.  Was thinking to myself this is starting to look like a real motorcycle again.  Gas went in, it sort of fired up on 3 cylinders.  Found a clogged float needle in the #4 cylinder, cleaned it, it was now running on 3.2 cylinders with the #3 being cold and #2 running a bit hot for some reason.  Spark was OK, it was getting fuel, compression was good but #3 was running almost 80 °F cold at the header.  Very strange.  No smoke out of the motor, things looked great just needed to get #3 firing.  Then I looked at the oil....  --water in the oil!---  Arrrrgggghhhhh!  Nearly took a sledge to the damn thing I was so pissed.  Now I have to drop the motor again, pull the head and cylinders to check for cracks, warpage or if it is just a leaky head or base gasket.  The only good news is that I have a spare head and base gasket for the motor already in hand and the valves can be adjusted and checked when the head is off.  If I need to have a deck planed than I will probably go ahead and have new valve guides installed or swap the head with my 1K titanium valve head from the original motor.  Guess the only good news is that there was almost NO metal in the oil, just some small flakes in the bottom, too large to pass though the screen.  The only question after this is the condition of the transmission, which I really do not want to even think about.

--H2O Update -- Dremel took a dump and my 4" hole saw has a 1/2" drive on it...  The good news is that the national service center for Dremel tools is 36 miles away in Palm Springs, so I will totter out there today to pick up the part.  The hole saw is another matter, think I will just drill four holes per side with a 2.5" hole saw and then Dremel out the bits in between to make a square hole with rounded corners.  The box looks OK, not great, but OK.  Glue is set so once I get the Dremel working I will start on the holes and mount up the radiator and reservoir, drill holes for the tubes and get them installed and prep the wiring to the box.  I will have to cannibalize my existing setup for the pump and the fans which means a bit of downtime for my current system.  Will not do that until the box is ready and set up to receive all the new components.

1 May 2005 - H2O box

Since I am so frustrated about the stupid job situation, I took matters into my own hand and started working on some long term projects that have been on the back burner for years in some cases.  Started building a propper box for the watercooler using 1" pine.  Box is 21.5 x 14.5 x ~8" with a lifting lid.  Wood was from Home Despot and the quality is not great, almost everyting is warped and I did not have a planer nor the time to spend getting it straight, so I used it.  Screwed up some of the measurements and had to do a lot of recutting and fitting.  Using a hand power saw for cutting the boards so things are not as square as I would like either (Sorry Mr. Watson!).  Drilled holes for the screws, glued the edges and assembled everthing but the top.  Made sure the radiator and the resivor would fit since they are the two largest items to go in.  Next will be drilling the air intakes, making the shrouds for the fans and radiator, fitting the lid and drilling the water holes.

25 April 2005 - On the way

Have just a single offer on the table at the moment, but am awaiting the response from an interview last week which I felt went Very well.  Either way, I am going to give a solid answer on all offers by Monday or Tuesday of next week, which is less than 7 days away.  The countdown begins.

14 April 2005 - When it rains....

OK, now have two offers on the table, both need to be answered by this weekend at the latest.  Grrr.

7 April 2005 - Going MEnt4L

Busy busy busy! Just got back from three frantic days at UCSB trying to get the vancomycin coupling to work.  Looks like about 10-20% after 32 h at 80-85 °C, left it in the hands of a very capable person to run the column on.  I think that more catalyst, making it stoichiometric, may work in my favor or heating it up to 100 ° to just Get the Darn compound and determine it spectral qualities.  Going away tomorrow to an interview in Chicago, then going to make the rounds at UCR next week and just got a call from Celera in Foster City about possibly interviewing there and need to get back to UCSB to have a look at the remaining conditions for the cross-coupling.  Forgot what it is like, being busy!  Where were all these people two months ago? (OK, so some (most) of it is my fault...)

30 March 2005 - Something New

My 21" monitor finally got so dim that it is only good for occasional use.  So, I spent some money and bought a brand spanking new Dell FP1905 19" flat screen monitor (1280x1024) which I got yesterday and hooked up.  I must say that it makes typing up text much easier on the eyes.  And, no fuzziness or dimming, which is nice.  Have not played any games on it yet, so I do not know how bad the ghosting will be on this ~20 ms monitor.  But for $275 it was a bargain that I really could not pass up.  No dead or stuck pixels yet either, so everything is looking good!

Had an interview with Mark Mascal at UC Davis for a postdoc position stating in May, and that looks very good.  One final interview is probably going to be with Obiter Research in Champaign IL, where a good friend of mine works.  That will occur on the 10th, so we will see how that goes.  The telephone interview went great, had a very nice conversation with the interviewer and got a good impression about the company.  It sounds like a good opportunity for me but it is Very far away from CA and my special someone (which is a huge factor!).

If I get a job I am going to upgrade to a DFI nForce4 board and one of the new E revision AMD64 3000+ 939 chips with probably an ATI X800 XL PCI-E video card (137+139+199 = too much!).  My primary system is rock stable at 3200+ but the watercooling system leaves much to be desired in terms of noise and stink.  Cleaned up the wiring a bit a couple of weeks ago and moved some CDR/DVD drives around, installing the Plexor CDR and a Toshiba DVD player into the big system.  The system that I had at work got stripped out of the crap case and installed into what used to be my Win2K box which failed due to some odd hardware reason (motherboard I believe).  That system runs XPPro with apache/php/mysql installed to act as a test webserver.  It too is being rather well behaved although I had to remove the SCSI drive from it, I think that IMB 9.1GB 10K SCSI drive finally bit the dust, although it could have just been a problem with the Adaptec card.

Been working on DnD adventure, will post that up once I get a group to run through it and see if I do not do a TPK.  May even try to sell it off...  Have found some great resources on the web for DnD and have been enjoying reliving my youth!

23 Febuary 2005 - Jobless

Still no word on jobs; threw out four CV's monday and one today with a headhunter.  Things have slowed down, so I am going looking...

What is it with people on eBay?!?!  Sold three items last week, all of which went to different people.  Of the three, all of which have now received thier products, only ONE left me feedback.  This is a real annoyance as I always leave feedback, no matter what.  Its important people!  Of the six that went on eBay, three sold.  Suprisingly the laptop did not go even for the low price of $100 which I had it up for.  The LCD and case is still just fine; the LCD alone brings in $200 routinely on eBay, so WTF is up with these people!  Dang, I'll put it up again with a slightly modified description and see if I get any bites, otherwise its getting dumped.

15 Febuary 2005 - Nutz

No word from anyone regarding a job.  Submitted to Genetech (3rd time), Gilead (4th time) and a small biotech firm in San Diego called... cant find it now.  If nothing by the end of the week, going to find something part time localy - CompUSA here I come.  There was an electronics assembly firm hiring locally for $12/hr, we'll see if I can get on there, that is pretty good money and I have some experience in that area.

11 Febuary 2005 - Too Much @#$% Update

It took no less than three (3!) 36x24x72" shelving units to store all the stuff in the garage.  Although I must say there is actually room in there to work.  Filled in some holes with wood epoxy on dad/Kevin's old L-shaped desk so that it might be useable; need more desk space in the house.  Test webserver and backup machine will be coming in today so that I can get back to work on goingone.com and an usmollards.com update.  Also going to fix all the chairs from the dining room set so that they are not so wobbly, but just getting the glue off is turning out to be a pain, think it will dissolve in acetic acid....

8 Febuary 2005

eBay is the word of the week.  Have six lots up, RC car radio, chem books, my old laptop and other stuff that still has some monetary value.  Of the six only one is currently selling, the RC car radio should go too.  Finally got an adapter for the truck's new transmission cooler so that will get installed this afternoon.  It is running a ton better than the other night, probably because the air cleaner is now no longer soaked with water like it was on Saturday.  K&N filters are great, rinse, oil reuse; worth every penny.  Going to install some switches to provide a cutout for the winshield wipers and wire a new power line into the radio this week.  The garage is looking better, been sorting through all the comptuer stuff getting it reoganized into bins; looks like I can toss a ton of it away it is so old.  VLB video cards, ISA modems (its the best modem I ever owned) ISA network cards, old PCI video units, six socket 7 motherboards and a bunch of AMD K6-2 processors... too old to be useful to anyone except as a beowulf cluster.  Going to get the server moved back indoors and up and running so I can do some web development again.  Pulled the 5xDVD SCSI drive out of it a few days ago to get the 50-pin SCSI cable so that my Plexor CDR can be installed into the main system.  Put the DVD drive in too, it copies CD's 4x faster than the Plexor.  21" monitor is finally on its last legs, the screen is so dim that it looks like it is turned off.  No $ to replace until the eBay cash starts flowing in, and even then it is not a top priority, have the E771 that can replace it.

6 Febuary 2005

Hmm, where to start.  We have successfully moved into the new place; junk and all.  Unbelieveable how much stuff you can accumulate - I have at least 12 boxes, a 6x8x6' pile of computers and computer accessories!  We have been paring it down a bit, took a trunkload of stuff to goodwill, and we were glad to be rid of it.  Mostly old clothes and *sniff* my toaster.  Almost enough room now to sqeeze between the pile of computer stuff and the pile of books and journal acticles.  House is getting set up, at least my computers are set up, which is all that really matters (haha, jk!).  Been finishing up long term projects, like wedding thank yous, sorting and filing six months of papers, doing work on the truck (a nightmare) and expanding the job search a bit.

Speaking of jobs, the Neurocrine interview went very well in my opinion.  Think my talk was a little shakey, but got a number of comments and questions that showed the audience was interested and involved.  My one on one with the head of the department went very well, a good discussion and back and forth.  The individual section heads I do not think were impressed, one was quite dissinterested and a bit dismissive and not at all prepared for my interview with him.  Curious that, either he was not interested enough in my qualifications to prepare or he was too busy to look at them.  I tend to think it is the former as his behavior during my talk was just a tad bit disrespectful.  All the others were 75/25, doing fairly well with the 75.  Confident I should hear something this week from them.  Symyx is a writeoff by now, haven't heard a thing in two weeks since my last contact.

Computers - overclocked my system up to 3000+ range.  No voltage adjustments required, just a straight bump up to 200 MHz FSB and a 10.5x multiplier and viola, 3000+.  Temps are up a tad, to 39 °C with no air through the radiator and the case temps sometimes bump the 30 °C mark.  Has to rewire all the fan switches, the computer fell over on its side during the move and destroyed them.  Didn't have many on-off-on switches so cobbled some on-on's to replace them.  Which is really not a problem as the rear exhaust fans and the hard drive fans should run all the time otherwise the 10K SCSI's get a bit, shall we say, warm.  Couldn't find a 50 pin SCSI cable much to my dismay, wanted to install the SCSI CDRW into the case for convienence's sake, no such luck.  Think there is a SCSI DVD in the garage, in V3's old work computer, that should have a 50-pin cable on it.  Other than that, nothing happening.  Still drooling over the nforce4 boards and AMD64's.  No $ - nixed!

Worked on the truck yesterday, it needed a tuneup and some TLC.  New plugs, cap and rotor, plug wires and a 180 °F thermostat to replace the 195 °F unit that was installed previously.  Its been running a bit on the warm side, 190-210 °F under normal loads and with a bit of transmission slip in the morning.  The trans oil looks good, nice and red no bits and pieces so its probably not overheating.  Found the radiator has both a trans oil and engine oil cooler installed, so might want to also think about installing a remote engine oil cooler and filter system, thats a shitload of heat being pumped into the cooling system.  Have a trans cooler that will go in front of the AC cooler, a 6-pass tube type, but need an adapter for the lines before intalling it.  All the plastic bits under the hood are starting to corrode, vaccuum lines, wiring harness wraps, crankcase-TBI vent hose.  Speaking of which, I Broke that bastard vent hose and a piece of plastic dropped into the valvetrain.  Spent two hours dissassembling the truck from the valve cover; found the bit of plastic and fished it out, reassembled the truck around the valve cover.  Doesn't run much better - schiza!

8 January 2005

Still no word from Symyx, at this point no news is probably bad news.  Got an interview on the 27th with Neurocrine Biosciences in San Diego, just wish I had some good results to talk about.  The last six months have been an utter dissapointment, only getting to the interesting stuff now, in the last two weeks of my position here.  Will probably finish up all the lab work in 8-10 days or so, spend a day or two packing then finish the move the following weekend.

Going to start to move this week, started packing last night.  One of the bikes will go down to the new place once the rain stops this week (Tues-thurs).  Take the other one down later in the week or next week.  The big move will be the weekend of the 22nd, hopefully will get 95% of it then.  Back here for a day or two after to clean, load up the last few things then get the heck out of dodge.  Grrr.  I have vowed to not buy anything new for the next month.... broke.

5 January 2005

No job offers yet, but did get an interview with Neurocrine biosciences in San Diego at the end of the month.  Got my fingers crossed.  Dnd went well, had a lot of fun trying to do damage to the party, but they rebuffed everything I sent at them.  Started them on a new adventure, so we will see how long they last, muuuhhahahahahaaa. *Evil Grin*

Got a bunch of stuff up on eBay, mostly textbooks that I have aquired over the past five years.  Some old reference books too, ones that I have replaced with newer versions.  Going to root around and get rid of a few more things too before I have to move, the extra cash will be a nice influx so I can afford gas!  lol 

Nothing new on the hardware front, ASUS A8N-SLI/AMD64 3000+ looks like a good replacement for my current AMD 2500+ but would require a new video card too, that pushes the price of the upgrade close to $500 and it just does not make sense right now.  Not playing games much at all since my pathetic video card is, well, pathetic.  And, no $$.  And no TIME.  Plus, having a ton of fun creating DnD adventures, so I will do my best to stay away from any new hardware purchases.  Might pick up a DVD-RW for the big system since the CD-RW, which still works great BTW, obviously will not burn DVD sized data.  And I have a ton of stuff to archive.  

The big system is running great after the switch rewire.  Found I could turn off all but the HD and rear exhaust fan and the system will run for hours w/o the CPU temp breaking 35 °C.  Gets a bit warm when playing Star Wars GB, but have never seen it break 40 °C. Case temps rarely top 26 °C, and if it does 5 min of the 120 mm fan running pumps enough air in to drop it to 22.

17 December 2004

The interview with Symyx went fairly well.  Not great, but OK.  Nice folks, good atmosphere and from what I can tell, lots of hands on chemistry.  They will let me know in the new year.  Also have an interview with neurocrine in San Diego sometime in Jan, so things are hopefully looking up.

1 December 2004

Woot Woot!  Got an interview with Symyx corporation in Santa Clara sometime later this month or early next month.  Thanks for turning on the light at the end of the poverty tunnel...

30 November 2004

Going to change my recommendation for spyware scanners.  Yesterday did some digging around and found a product called BPS-Spyware Remover, installed it and was very happy with the results, it found two bits of registry spyware which neither ad-aware or Spybot S&D had found.  So thats it, the recommendation for antivirus is AVG, and for spyware Ad-aware, Spybot S&D and BPS-Spyware Remover.  There is a new version of AVG out as of the 13th of Nov., I have not installed it yet, but will be doing so today or tomorrow and will let you know the results.

As to computers, not much happening, with work, looking for work, creating DnD adventures and moving all about the state makes for little down time.  I did purchase a SATA card for the video processor computer so that the 160 Gb drive can be moved into that system.  Fry's was a big dissapointment, not much interesting on sale or, in the case of video cards, nothing interesing on the shelf.  Left without spending the money I had in my pocket but picked up a new thermocouple lead and some bits and pieces for my Maglite.  Going to put together some spare parts for Brandon, since he asked for his own computer.  Left me in a bit of dilema over what parts to put into it.  HD is no problem but MB/Processor is, there are no reasonably fast spares here at the house.  Was thinking of upgrading the big system to AMD-64, but with no PCI-Express MB's on the market the system will soon be completely out of date.  And, I would like to be able to have the option of going to nVidia's SLI setup to speed up video performance.  My ATI 9600 is fine, runs at 9600 Pro speeds all day long, and I am not playing many games that require a fast video card.  That is not to say I would like to play a little Halflife2 or Doom3.  Adios.

I do have the login system up and running on the test system for goingone.com, which will start to be taken over to usmollards.com.  The same login/admin system will be active on both, I just have to get the trouble shooted, create the system for adding stories to the webpage and get it all working together... A neverending amount of work, I chip away at it a couple of hours every evening, hopefully by christmas with goingone.com and usmollards.com.  Once one is working the other should not be terribly difficult to adapt to the other.

15 November 2004

Been steadily working on both the usmollards and goingone.com updates.  For goingone.com have ways to enter stamps, view them from both the public and admin sides along with uploading files and a number of other items.  Still have a lot of work to do, have to integrate a login system, work on editing existing database entries along with autoscaling pix and many many other things.  The usmollards site is going to be a cakewalk in respect to goingone, with just a login sytstem and a way for people to post on either a public or private site.  The login/user reg system will probably be very similar between both goingone and usmollards.  Lot so more plans for both, but little time - on my last 6 weeks in the lab and need results BADLY.  Had a rotten week last week, essentially wasting four full work days doing work on wrong substrates.  Preall upset me as it was completely careless mistakes.  This week planning on Two couplings, still analyzing results from last weeks and the week befores X-couple, need detailed nmr's and analysis before moving on.  Busy week!  Then Turkey day and a DnD 3.5 session with the boys, looking forward to DMing an fun and dynamic game! Should be fun!

26 October 2004

Its Started!  Finally started working on the login and user registration system for usmollards.com and the assorted CMS.  So far the only thing that is done are the main page, the login and registration scripts.  They all work, you can create a new user on the test server and then login to the system, system uses sessions to track the user too.  Tonight I will work on the logout and lost password scripts and start to think about how to do the CMS-data entry system. Think I will do it modularly, with your login determining what options in the right hand menu you get to see - just like all other CMS systems.  Use a cron to write the front page, updating after a user makes a new entry into the CMS system.  Kind of fun, using Larry Ullman's "PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites" as the main resource along with his Advanced PHP book and a multitude of other sources.  Its actually quite fun, so far.  The test server is not public, it runs on a win2K system at home.

23 October 2004

Win2K system is up and running with phphomedition2.4 - works good, Apache 2.0.49, php5 and mySQl in one easy to install and download and run package.  Started working on doing more in php, starting with my resume which now uses a php template to display.  Next is going to a database driven frontpage and CMS system for the entire site; which I an looking at starting very soon (like Today).  Will start with login and admin for usmollards then move to a php-mysql driven front page which will allow registered users to post news.  Next will be private user spaces and the ability to upload files and make pages to display independent/individual content followed by integration into an xmass list interface.  Lots to do, but looks doable...  Since the preliminary site will run here on my hardware site, keep your eyes open here for changes.

13 October 2004 - Famous Last words...

Ducati battery is fairly flat this morning, crossing my fingers that it will start after work.  Will have to break away a little early and get the battery on the charger for a few hours tonight.  Did not set up the Win2K comp last night, was a very bad mood.  Tonight, if all goes well.

12 October 2004

$2.75 for 91 this morning.  Ouch, glad it was only 3.62 gallons.  Chem is not working although last night I thought it was.  Nuts.  Tonight after group will be setting up the win2K comp, dual monitor setup and installing php/apache/mySQL so I can work on making a CMS system for this blog and the usmollards main page along with an X-mas list site for the extended family.  Don't really have any good ideas on how to get it all in and working, but i'll muddle through it.

11 October 2004

Moved the last of my stuff over the weekend.  Gas prices didn't cooperate, they jumped $0.20+ last week and although they remained stable over the weekend, 2.40 is quite a bit to be paying for 87 octane dinosaur!  Good news is that will be the last trip until T-Day, probably.  Now just back and forth to the wife's place every weekend.  

Ducati battery survived being discharged; still starting the bike a week after charging it up.  New slave cylinder is working well, effort is reduced and pull is nice and smooth and consistant.  Next on the list is bleed the front brakes, change oil, clean and fix some small items like the trunk lid.

Almost picked up a new FZR motor, but at $400 it was just too expenisve considering I can get a yzf motor from a guy in LA, with wiring harness, all switch gear, headers, pipe for $500.  YZF motor has a much stronger transmission and ten+ more horsepower, which on the 150/70-18 rear of the FZR should make it exciting.  Wish I could find a junked FZR/YZF and just strip it down.  All my tools are now here in my garage, make me almost feel like a man again!  Thinking seriously about selling off a bunch of parts lying around to finance the next couple of months, money is going to be tight.  Need to get new tires for the truck, new wiperblades and change the oil soon.  Nice to know all my gear is now here and I can do it myself!

6 October 2004 - Parts is parts

Yesterday morning before work I broke out the 160 Gb Samsung SATA drive that I got from CompUSA over the weekend for $80 (after rebate).  Plugged it in and expected it to come right up, get detected and formatted.  Didn't happen.  First the ASUS ANX8X-Deluxe board that I have has a jumper for turning the SATA channels on, it was off.  And while doing that without much light I managed to reset the BIOS.  Thirty minutes later I was booting the system up, installing the SATA drivers and wondering where the drive was.  Put my hand on it and found it was not getting warm, nor was it spinning; no power.  Swapped the power connector out from one of the working drives and it spun up, was detected in BIOS and by the OS, must be a power problem.  Started looking through the huge wiring loom and found a loose wire, one that had pulled out of a molex connector, 12V.  Pulled the connector pin out and soldered the wire back in along with its brother wire that was loose too.  Problem solved, booted, formatted NFTS and asigned a drive letter.  157 Gb is a hell of a lot of space.  Took 3 minutes to move 3.6 Gb from a 10K SCSI-3 drive to the new one, pretty quick.

Next up is the 10K 36.6 Gb WD Raptor drive that I have lying about, that should be a screamer.  Speaking of noise, the new SATA drive is fairly quiet, definately quieter than the 18 Gb SCSI drive currently in the system.  That SCSI drive is a real screamer, must be responsible for 50% of the case noise.  New switching system is working well, everything seems fairly cool and no crash problems.  Tried overclocking the memory to 400 MHz, 200 MHz DDR but the system was not too stable.  Switching the PC3200 memory out for the PC4000 stuff may work along with relaxing the timings a bit. Otherwise, does an easy multiplier OC to 3000+. l8r

2 October 2004 - Some Work

This morning took an hour to swap the 7/12V fans switches out for 7/off/12V switches.  Only took a short time to rewire them and test that they worked correctly.  Found that I can run the HD cooler and the 120 mm PSU fans and maintain a 4-6 °C temp gain over ambient.  With the 120 mm front case fan on lowest setting, the case temp drops to 2-3 °C over ambient and is rather quiet.  With all but the PSU fan going, the temp quickly goes to 9-10 °C over ambient but it is very quiet.  Can also shut the H2O cooler's fan off for over an hour with only a 10 °C rise in CPU temp, from ~28-30 to 38-40, (6-8 to 16-18 °C over air).  With them off, the comp is very quiet with only the whine of the 10K HD's audible.

Swaped the clutch slave cylinder out for the new one from Evoluzione.  Installation was simple, the directions excellent and the product works as advertised.  Unfortunatly the battery was dead, got it jump started but it did not hold a charge during the day and had to get another jump when I left work.  Tried it again this morning, but went for an ~1 h ride around to put some juice in the battery.  Stopped for gas and there was not enough charge left to turn the fuel pump on.  Took the bus home, got the truck, bought a new battery charger and picked the bike up.  Just hope the sulphation is not so bad that the battery is irrecoverable; it has only been in the bike 8 months.

27 September 2004 - Im Driving...

Uggh, drove up from south to the house.  What should be a 2.5 h trip always turns into a 5 h nightmare.  Wasn't bad until about an hour in, then some SUV-idiot flips and stops traffic for 45 min.  Then 25 miles from home traffic just stops, took me 65 min to go the last 25 miles...  Just sux.

Did make a suprising discovery over the weekend though.  While loading 'boxes' into my truck I was peeking into each to see what was in each, just to be sure that it was not breakable or anything, and I found all the watercooling equipment that I lost earlier this year.  Radiator, couple of 120 mm fans, a built resivoir, tubing and a bunch of misc electrical items.  Hurray!  Thought I had lost all that stuff, now when I get a spare moment I can rebuild the current h2o cooler in the big system to 1. be quiet and 2 improve efficency and 3. make it more presentable to the public.  Had a great weekend though, lots of cookies and good food and great company, wouldn't have missed it for anything!

24 September 2004 - Interview

Had an interview with Neurocrine Biosciences this morning.  My old roommate Tim Gross is a process chemist, has worked there for 4-5 years now and seems to really enjoy the place.  Hopefully this will lead to a site interview and a post-doctoral or full time working position.  Comp at home is just Too loud, can barely hear myself think with it on.  Disconnected one of the 80 mm fans in the PSU which helped a bit.  This weekend think I will rewire all the switches to 7/off/12V status or build a couple of LM317 based voltage regulators and run the fans through those.  Case temps run 2 °C over ambient and CPU 10 °C up with the fans on slowest settings so cooling is not a problem.  Think I can turn off all but the 120 mm front fan, HD and upper exhaust fan and still have a workable case design.  The water cooler could also do with getting a new radiator (heater core) and dumping one of the fans in the name of efficiency.  Could probably mount the whole affair into the larger case too, but that is another project.  Need to fix the Duck clutch too, parking permit expires on the 30th.

22 September 2004 - Fun!! NOT!

Moving weekend turned out to be a lot less fun than expected.  Guess the one good point was that the weather cooperated and it was less than 100 °C.  Packing went well, decided to just move necessities to Redlands, meaning furniture and vitals, from the Bay Area via the suburban.  Dad and Chris were nice enough to pick up my furniture and boxes from the Lake, load them into a trailer and have them ready to go at Janets place.  Started down there on Sunday, hooked up to the trailer and hauled out of there.  50 miles down the road the trailer was swinging around so badly due to an overloaded truck and wonky truck steering that all my stuff nearly got tossed all over the freeway!

Dropped the trailer off in Pixley, Chris came and picked it up and we continued on to Redlands, made it there about midnight.  Offloaded on monday, took all of 60 minutes, packing took 5 h.  Set up the computer, TV, cable etc.  Almost looks like someone lives there now.  Dad is bringing the rest of the stuff down Thursday.  I'll probably go down and meet him to help him unload.  Uggh, more driving.

Back the SJ on monday night, 6.5 h drive.  hurredly packed up computers in the room that evening, got 4 h of shuteye and back to packing the truck the next morning.  Pulled out at about 11 am with a Stuffed truck, motorcycle included with all the comps and desk stuff.  Into SB at 5, had to stop and nap twice, was just too beat.  Unloaded by 7, 1 h rest, Big comp up and running by 9 and Man is that thing NOISY!  Worked on updates, virus, firewalls, mal/spyware scanning and turned in at 1150.  Back at work today, not being very succesfull or working hard, starting to feel guilty about it.  Interview on Friday with Neurocrine Biosciences in San Deigo.  Argh.

16 September 2004

Pre-weekend update.  Am finally moving all my 'junk' out of storage into the roach Infested apartment with my new wife.  Tomorrow, up to the house, pack stuff into the truck, then down to the new place on Saturday night/Sunday.  Unload on Sunday, unpack stuff then back up to the old house to pack up the Big System, file server, tool chest, fzr motor and 'other junk'for carting down to the old place.  Should make life a little easier down here, might actually get to work on christmaslists.com.

No changes this week to computers, although the mini system is going down to the new place to be the primary desktop system down there.  Should change the cpu fan out, rather noisy 80 mm fan, but when it is under the desk it seems pretty quiet.  When the big system gets here it will get the 36 Gb WD Raptor 10K SATA drive to replace the 9.1 Gb SCSI-3 10K drive as boot.  Been debating if to pull the Lite-On 851 DVD-RW drive from the mini-system to put it into the big system since I would probably use it to burn disks.  Haven't yet upgraded the BIOS to write double density (8.5 Gb) DVD disks as there is no media available for purchase under $2/disk.  Not yet worth the trouble to flash the BIOS.

7 September 2004

What a couple of weeks.  Got married, got some results in the lab and had an anxiety attack!  Bought a TIVO for $50 from CircuitCity last week, still haven't installed it and am debating wether to take it back.  The big problem I see with it is that if I want to save any of the shows that I record for my own viewing pleasure, I cannot.  This is unlike the new Hauppage WinTV cards that can go into a HT-PC and record shows in any format you would like; avi, mpeg-2, and with hardware on the fly encoding are relativly fast.  The one nice thing about the TIVO is that it is the new 540040 kernel which will allow addressing abouve 137 Gb and is much more hackable than the older 440040 systems.  There are a lot of sites out there that will allow you to hack your TIVO to put in larger HD's and let you transfer files from the HD to a separate PC once you hack a new kernel into the system.  Might just try it for fun, 200 Gb HD's are down in the sub $100 range.

There finally might be a solution to my video card issue, them all being Ancient technology.  The most recent one I have is a Radeon 9600 non-pro, nor XT that resides in my big system at the other house so I don't even use it.  As much as I have been an ATI supporter for the past few years, I simply cannot afford to go out and buy a $200-400 video card just to play games.  Too much money and the technology that I would be buying for a sub-150 card is now two generations old.  Not a good solution.  Today on the net might be solutions to all my problems.  nVidia just introduced the 6600, a 0.11 micron DX9 design that is kicking the pants off of the $400 ATI card.  This should push prices on the older generation cards down to more reasonable levels.  But for the price, I might just defect back to the nVidia side.

25 August 2004

XP SP2 - Now installed on my work computer and has not caused any grief, yet.  SB comp is still using Win2K, so there is no significant update for that particular system.  Will update the big system when I get the chance.  Looking forward to next month when I get to retrieve my big sytem, file server and all the junk from my old place.  Not excited about the physical move, but it will be nice to get all my toys nearby.  And a garage to work on the bikes again.  Would like to make a dent in building a new FZR motor so I can get back to some serious riding.

19 August 2004

Not really a hardware update.  Sitting at work, not really feeling like working so thought I would just write someting.  Anything.  Getting married in three days, looking forward to seeing everyone and having some fun.  Feel like I am missing something though.  Ah, well, schiza.

18 August 2004

Fixed the problem with the overheating Antec/XP2500+.  When I originally installed the HSF I used whatever cheap, white silicon grease that was handy.  When I removed the HS from the CPU last week, the 'grease' looked crusty where it had been squeezed out between core and HS baseplate and wet at the interface between the two units.  This did not look very good and obviously was not perfoming well; temps were hitting 75 °C and system crashes were constant.  Replacing the grease with some Artic Silver II saw temps drop to 42-45 °C or roughly 10-14 °C over case temps.

Also placed a new 512 Mb DIMM of Kingston HyperX PC4000 ram into the system.  I did not expect it to make any difference in performance of the machine, but it cut boot times in half.  The monitor got replaced too, with a Samsung DF997, 19" shadow mask CRT which the jury is still out on.  The pixels are rather big and evident to the naked eye, so we are contemplating replacing it with an LCD monitor once pices come into the sub $300 range.  Still waiting for prices to come down on video cards for my big system, there is no way I will pay $200 for a generation old card (9800 pro).  Will be installing XP SP2 this week on my work computer, once I get the drive ghosted, just in case.  V3 picked up a 10000 rpm, 36 Gb SATA drive to go into the big sytem when it gets moved, should cure the slow boot times caused by poor MS SCSI performance.

29 June 2004

Added a new link to the Techdeals menu, looks pretty good.

Got 99.3% ee on the SAD that I did last week - good enough for govt work! nbsp;Off to iodonate, transmetallate to Li and trap on trimethylborate.  Then the real coupling fun begins!

25 June 2004

V3's Bday!  Happy Birthday

Hardware, well, not much.  Work computer got V3's old comp with a slow, 12 Gb WD ATA-33 drive in it along with a slightly fuzzy 17" Mag monitor.  It works, lets me surf the web and get work done at the same time.

At the SB abode, the Antec Aria is not working out as planned.  Its noisier than I even thought it would be, just about as noisy as the old comp that is now at work.  There are a couple of tricks I can do to 1. cool the CPU temps off and 2. quiet it down a bit.  For the CPU, best bet is to make a shroud to direct the 80mm fan onto the cooler.  This should cut down on the noise and on the CPU heat, which can often top 65 °C with case temps approaching 35 °C.  Noise can be handled by installing the optional slot blower, which will help keep the case cooler and the 120mm PSU fan from running up to full speed.  Must say, everything works as advertised though, slick little case.  A 7V 60mm fan on the intake side would go a long way to keeping temps down too.

Back at work, excited about my project.  Making fair progress at this point, working towards really busting out next week and performing new chemistry.  Advancing the project at last.

Going to try to make this site php based, with more dynamic look and feel.  Want to add a few more links to one side and start thinking about how to present Chemistry information on the web, esp for my Chem 1 and Chem 6 students.  Many ideas, but little time to implement them.  And with no promise of any payoff from these projects, I really cannot invest too much time into them.  Adios

14 May 2004

Wow, another quarter almost gone.  6C has been fun, even worked on getting a website that looked a little better up; still needs work and the 109 page is actually better done.  Next is to do these using a database driven site so that I can update them quickly.  Too much work though.  Going back into the lab with BHL next week, as soon as he can figure out where to put me into.  Working on vanco project and probably copper hydride reductions for the next six months.  hell, at least it is a paycheck.

bought a LiteOn 811 DVD burner the other week along with a locked 2500+ barton and an ECS K7VTA motherboard.  Also picked up a mini-ATX board, a Soyo unit for jsut the cost of shipping!  The motherboard is not as small as I expected, but still a pretty tiny unit.  This will probably be the one that goes on my desk at work since I will be needing a unit on my desktop there.  Find some slick case like the antec aria to stick it in... hehe.  The Illama 21" monitor at home is dying a slow death, doing the screen fade.  Need to look at a replacement.  The Samsung montiors look promising, the DF955 and DF1110, 19 and 21" respectively, both look acceptable replacements and can be had for ~200 and ~450.  Since I paid 1K for the Illama, this to me does not sound like a bad deal.

17 March 2004

May be teaching chem 6c next quarter - still not full time, will have to find some part time work to make up the difference.

9 March 2004

Ahh, what has been happening.  Two words.  Not much.  Been looking unsucessfully for work.  There is nothing going on, hardware has completely stopped as the money has dried up completely.  Still want to get a DVD-+RW, but haven't found the right deal.  Prices are still hovering around $120+ for a good rewriter....

26 January 2004

UO-X beta page, check this often

13 January 2004 - Part II

Been very busy with a different project recently and have been rather sick so little has been going on.  In fact, just been hunting up a DVD-+R/RW drive so I can back up some of the prodigious amount of data that is floating around.  From my research, as long as you stay away from the really cheap models made by BST, you cannot buy a 'bad' DVD burner.  Prices are coming down slowly, seeing deals for under $100.  This should drop further when the 8x +/- and dual layer drives hit the market in the next 3-6 weeks.  So, if you can find one for under $100, think about it, otherwise wait a few weeks for a significant price drop.  Purchased a portable USB smartmedia reader; was getting sick of the crappy software used by my camera to grab pictures, it was slow and poorly written.   Now I can grab them quickly and on any computer.

Also picked up a new PCMCIA 802.11b/g card for the house.  My old hacked up SMC card was not working right and the usb adapter (DWL-650) fails to work with win2K or XP.  $49 on sale for the new D-Link 2x 802.11b/g card which is a good deal without looking too hard.  Missed out at CompUSA with the 802.11b/g router for $69 and they never put bridges on sale for some reason.  Will keep looking, its not a critical item anyway.

13 January 2004 - PI

Some very interesting news items have cropped up in the last two days.  Both concerning Alzheimer's; the first talking about a simple way to block the formation of amylase plaques by inhibiting an enzyme, beta-secretase (BACE1) in genetically engineered mice.  this is interesting because there are a number of drugs on the market that block this enzyme but have never been considered for Alzheimer's treatment, can you say a new mode of action?  This was an NIH sponsored mouse study, but I'll be damned if I can find the report there, so you will have to read this one.

The second piece of news is out of Australia.  A simple treatment of a copper and zinc absorbing compound reduced the progression of dementia in early Alzheimer's patients.  This compound, clioquinol, was discovered over 100 years ago and is used in treatment of athletes foot, if you can believe it.  The trial was small, 36 patients, but NIH funded and reported in a well respected journal Archives of Neurology.  For all of us at risk, this is good news and the efficacy of clioqunol was greater than anything currently on the market (donepezil) and it is no longer under patent protection thus should be relatively cheap to manufacture and distribute.  Aryl iodides are a bit of a pain in butt to work with though, light sensitive and not tremendously stable.

1 January 2004

The garage server seems to have gone kaput, so am putting this up so that I have a separate place to have all my links and other stuff.  Home system has got a temp version of XP Pro, just for trials sake.  Would like to put a new, 15K SCSI drive into the system to run the OS on.  Will have to try to find one at SurplusComputers for about $20, otherwise they are really expensive.  System needs another 512Mb RAM; it has 512 now but it could really use the speedup more ram will provide when doing photoshop.  Got the barton up to 200 Mhz FSB, something like 2200 MHz on the processor.  Watercooling system is preforming well, but it could do with a refill.  Well, it really needs to be rebuilt, but no opportunity.

13 December 2003

Finally figured out how to lower the noise on V3's comp; disconnected the 80 mm PSU fan, connected the 92 mm fan and covered some of the internal openings in the psu.  Noticeable and instant decrease in case and cpu temps and a huge decrease in noise.  I really did not think that there would be that much effect, but there was.

Added a diode to the switched powerstrip, 1N4001.  This goes across the incoming 12V leads and is supposed to prevent a voltage spike from the collapsing magnetic field from frying the PSU.  Simple fix.

V3 got hooked up on cable internet, Yes!  They got it all hooked up and figured out, cable connection and digital cable - 250 channels of crap on the TV!  But, we do get discovery science and TechTV, which sometimes have interesting things on them.

Been slowly working on getting a content management system up on usmollards.com.  Have it working on a test server on V3's comp, but I am really not happy with the way php-nuke looks and works.  Just have not found a good set of explainations on what does what and where and how - how do topics fit with categories with articles with stories with reviews!.?!  Very frustrating!  And no ability to have picture gallerys?!  Arrgh, makes me want to write my own! (not!)

25 November 2003

Wow, only a month until christmas.  No X-mass list.com this year, just havent found the time to do it.  Good news on the computer front, the printer works great and the Barton I bought is unlocked.  It is chugging along at 2097 Mhz at the moment, nice and stable at default voltage.

23 November 2003 Part-II

Wanted to record the Barton 2500+'s codes otherwise I will lose it.  AXDA2500DKV3D, 9822567290744, AQXEA 0331SPMW.  0.13 um Barton @ 1833 MHz.

23 November 2003

Dang, amazing what people will pay for stuff on eBay.  The AMD 2100+ is a 2002 model and clearly outclassed by a $40 processor available from newegg.com.  Currently it is getting 62.01 for it, almost $10 over retail.  Hehe, now I just hope that the motherboards going for a good price, if they don't sell that would suck. 

Onto another story, tried to find a DVI-I to vga adapter localy.  Fry's, Central Computers, Surplus Computers and finaly found one at CompUSA for $25.  Didn't want an adapter either, wanted a cable to eliminate a possible source of signal degradation.  No luck.  Not installed with the new monitor yet, not enough room on the desktop to fit everything.  The printer is working well; does a good job on pix and a fair job on black and white.  Adios.

20 November 2003

Just stuck four items up on eBay.  Thorton core XP 2000+ AMD processor, two ECS K7VTA3 v.8 motherboards and an Athlon XP 2100+ Palamino cored AMD processor.  Need to recoup some of the cost from this week.  Should bring in almost $200 for the four items, we will see.  If you want to see, click the linnky!

Off to the office!

19 November 2003

Today I spent way too much money.  Lets see... Belkin C2P800 VA UPS for $109 with a $60 rebate from BB, HP C1160 inkjet printer for $89 at Surplus Computers and a $119 20" Viewsonic PG790 monitor.  I really did not need the monitor, but my Iilayma 21" monitor that I paid an ungodly ammount for 4 years ago has been fading in and out so if it goes, I have a reasonable replacement.  Besides, I can have some dual monitor fun for a couple of weeks.  Hooked the UPS up as soon as I got home and not a single crash since!  Funny, but the monitor has not done the fade in and out... dang!  Might just have been a problem with power supply which would really suck.  Plugged into the UPS is the H2O cooler, remote CD-RW, computer and the monitor; the UPS software reports 61% usage.  Tomorrow going to get a DVI-I to VGA converter, extend the desk out for the new monitor with a piece of plywood and set the printer up.  This is the first printer I have bought since the $300 HP500 in 1992.  Not bad, hope this one lasts as long.  Rearranged the room a bit by moving a filing cabinet closer and using that as a stand for the remote CDRW box and the H2O cooler.  Might even stick the printer up there, we'll see.

IP seems pretty stable.  In wait and see mode.

18 November 2003

Last week picked up two Fry's deals, one for a Barton 2500+ and ECS motherboard and a second for a Thornton 2000+ with the same motherboard: the former for $89 and the latter for $64.  On eBay, the Thornton 2000+ is going for $65+ as it is really a 0.13 um Barton with 256 kb of its L2 cache disabled.  A quick cover of the L1 bridge will enable the remaining 256 kb.. an excellent deal to the right overclocker.  The motherboards go for 35-40 a piece, so if I sell everything including the 2100+ but not the Barton, I should do a little better than break even... cool.  They are going up on eBay tonight or tomorrow for a Sat/sunday sale date.

Put the Barton in last night along with the Radeon 9600 non-Pro that I picked up a few weeks ago.  Modded the Radeon with a fan on the passive heatsink, nothing fancy but it cools better.  Had to remove 256 Mb ram; PC2100/CAS2.5 not up to snuff at 166 MHz (333DDR, PC2700) but the system seems to be running quite well.  In fact, the comp has stopped crashing at random with memory errors, which make a huge difference in usability.  Still running a DangerDen Maze1 waterblock with the old cooling setup, it runs 31 °C at 2500+ (1829MHz) with an air/H2O temps 20.9/23.1 °C.  A tiny bit cooler and a heck of a lot faster than the 2100+ .  Seti units are now routinely being completed under three hours, down from almost five with the 2100+ and 4.2 h with the 1333 Mhz Duron in the file server.

Just noticed that the IP address for the server changed, this is going to be a problem.  It is now 24.6.102.44 and subject to change at any time.  Will have to write a script to grab the IP and post it on the usmollards server so that a quick link can be maintained.  Don't want to lose all this valuable information (yea, right).  We were swapped over to comcast from SBCglobal last month, and it looks like they own a different block of IP addresses.  As to if they allow us to keep the IP, who knows, they might have just changed the addresss and not put it onto a true dynamic link.  A quick release/renew looks like the IP stayed 24.6.102.44 - definately not as easy to remember as the old one.

4 November 2003

Did a large download over the weekend at school, it topped out at 1996 Kbps!  Only got a picture of it at 1485 Kbps; a 490 Mb download in under 4 minutes, Gotta love bandwidth. This is for a new beta for Lords of Everquest, a RTS game.  Going to install today and spend a few minutes haveing a look.

Think I am going to start selling my services as a computer technician.  Been encouraged by Dad, V3 and others to do so.  Figured $30/hr for my inexperienced services.  Will do home network setup inc. DSL/Cable, setup email, LAN setup and troubleshooting, wireless and anything else I can sort out.  Think I will work on a get it to work or don't pay basis, with the exception of when I have to purchase hardware.  Now for a flier design; will put it up at the corner market and see if it generates any business.

22 October 2003

Read an interesting article about powerline noise and computer reboots.  As I mentioned previously, big system does this constantly.  It might be dirty power which makes sense since my APC-650 died a horrible overheating death and my comp runs off of the same powerstrip as my speakers, waterpump, fluorescent lights.  A Monster Cable HTS 1000 or a Brickwall filter (for line level sources) were the most commonly recommended solutions.  Going to see if one can be found on eBay.  

21 October 2003

Update on the Radeon 9600 debacle.  Found the receipt tucked away under the bed, all stapled together and ready to be sent off.  Still have not installed it, cannot decide which computer to put it into... home or V3's?

Home got a D-Link 614+ wireless router.  Range is improved over the SMC7004WBR and the D-Link is Much more configurable.  An almost real firewall, mac address control, better security options and an easier interface made it easy to configure, install and get working.  Mom's laptop now is on the net reliably and is configured for email.  Tried to get the TiVo onto the net but it would not detect the DWL-650 usb adapter I plugged into it and even when the power was on, there was almost no signal.  A second bridge is probably going to be the only solution, fortunately they are coming down in price pretty dramatically.

Ah, hardware.  Built a new watercooler reservoir for use with a Beckett 250 gph pump that was purchased for the original H2O cooling project on my K7-650.  This pump was too large to fit in the 4x4x4" underground electrical box currently serving as my reservoir at the time.  A 6x6x4" box was purchased years ago for this pump, but it did not fit into the original or replacement housings not used.  The container mounting the waterpump and radiator will be purpose built for this application, probably of wood or temporarily of cardboard.  It is almost ready to go, just needs tubing installed and assembling.  This will feature auto turn on by relay controlled powerstrip, a rheostat controlled 12 V 120 mm Sunon or 24 V 120 mm Pabst fan with a DangerDen Maze 1 waterblock and 1/2" ID Tygon 3606 tubing.  This will be installed most likely on V3's computer, since it is a noisy bastard.  But, primary noise source is the powersupply fan. A baffle, a quieter fan or voltage reduction on the fan needs to be installed to really get the system silent.  The case is well insulated and almost no HD noise can be heard external to the case.

My big system got some bits stripped out of it and the front plates installed, reducing front noise a tad.  Removed the fan/temp controller unit; it was decommissioned a long time ago and just taking up space.  Plans for this system is installation of a new watercooling system using a hydor L20 pump, chevy caprice radiator core and a Maze 4 waterblock all contained within the case.  Have to make some space for the radiator, not too difficult.  LM317 voltage regulators will replace many of the 7/12V fan switches.  I would really like to build voltage regulators outlined here and built around the MIC29152BT low dropout voltage regulator, but finding this component in the US is proving difficult.  An AMD 2500+ Barton core K7 would also be a nice way to spend all the Fry's gift certificates I have saved up and make a significant improvement in speed.  With a new watersystem in the main system means the fileserver can also go onto watercooling.

What I really need is a permanent job.  Resume, research summary and publications

Actually, this looks like a Blog, grrr.

24 September 2003

Damn, now I'm pissed.  Bought a new video card from CompUSA a few weeks ago, a Radeon 9600 built by Xtasy; 325 MHz GPU, 400 MHz Memory.  It was on sale with all sorts of rebates for $99, out the door was $139 with another $30 in rebates.  Then, I lost the receipt so no rebates (Strike one).  Now, wanting to confirm that I have a non-Pro version, I check the memory timings and find it is cheap ass Hynix memory rated at 250 Mhz (Strike 2).  This will probably be the limiting factor in an overclock as it is well known the VPU (GPU, wtf) will do at least 400 MHz using something like Rage3D Tweak.  Now, I would like to use it, but don't have a FAN for the heatsink and V3's friggin computer is Hot (Strike 3).  I'm out.

22 September 2003

Ah, did get a phone interview with the group hiring a tech. position on the UCSB campus.  Made the short list, interviewer was very impressed with my qualifications.  That gave me a good boost of the old psyche, but they have not called back to tell me if they want a regular interview.  Maybe today.

I managed to get a firewire PCI card for $14 from compgeeks.com along with some DVD/Movie editing software.  Very good deal.  Card works well.  In the same order was a 2.5" USB2.0 HD enclosure for my laptop harddrive.  A quick swap and viola, it works pretty good, much more portable, lightweight and CHEAP!!!  Left the 60 Gb drive in the firewire/USB1.1 enclosure, since it does not go anywhere.  With the addition of the firewire card, access times are much improved but the noise is pretty bad.  The 25 mm fan is very noisy. 

V3's computer is working farily well.  Pulled the wires off of the ineffective 92 mm PSU fan leaving just one fan running in the entire system, the 80 mm PSU exhaust fan.  System noise was much reduced but temps actually increased.  When I set the system up in '98, I installed but never hooked up an 80 mm intake fan.  Activating this fan dropped temps 12 °C in he case and 2-5 °C on the CPU.  Noise increased slightly to almost intolerable levels.  Still thinking of going to water, just need to pick up a reservoir and a radiator.  A beckett pump from an old project that will fit in a 6x6" or greater electrical box.  A fedco 2199 radiator from a '90 chevy caprice (no AC) will take care of the radiator duties along with a 120 mm sunon fan, low flow.  Probably pick up a slick rheostat unit from CompUSA for the fans and to switch the pump on.  But, I have to wire in a relay to turn the 120V pump on and off.  With no equipment down here, that might prove a little more difficult.  I need a job.

4 September 2003

Didn't get an interview for the local position and it looks like they will not be keeping me on in the comming fall to teach, so unemployment here I come.  With that said, nothing happening on the hardware front.  Obtained more tygon tubing to build a new watercooler system, just have to get back home to build it.

28 August 2003

Haven't been home in about 4 weeks, so the mail is probably piling up.  Last I was there, it was mainly working on the truck and Ducati.  Got the truck smogged and registered not long afterwards.  Ducati has issues; mainly a leak in the remote clutch actuator.  New one is $200, replacement piston over $60 so it will have to wait untill I get a reasonable paycheck.  The FZR is still running, but just barely.  The front brake master cylinder has developed a bit of an internal leak, but there is one on eBay so got my fingers crossed.

On the hardware end, rebuilt V3's home desktop.  Put the Asus KT333 Dragon Lite into the system with my 1333 MHz Athlon, 256 Mb ram and a new HD, maxtor 60 Gb.  Had to put on the stock AMD heatsink in the mini-tower case since there is no space between the CPU and the PSU for a larger heatsink.  I did just find that there is a low profile Thermaltake heatsink available, just have to find it cheaper on eBay.  System runs very hot, 52-59 C CPU, 35-42+ on case temps.  The PSU needs different fans: it has a two fan design that I think is just heating the case up and not pumping air out.  With no intake fan due to noise, it gets mighty hot in there.  Might go to water, but space is extremely limited.  Finding an in-line pump in town is proving to be difficult.  Tried all the aquarium shops but they want $99 for an Eniem 1200 (~45 online), got one left to try.  Think I will build a reservior out of plexiglass/acrylic scraps and use a chevette heatercore as radiator.  It all has to wait until after the first and a reasonable paycheck.

21 July 2003

OK.  So wtf is up.  Set up the usmollards.com domain, send out an email to the family about who would like email addresses and the like, and what do I get back?  Nothing.  Not a single reply.  Grrr.

17 July 2003

Just went ahead and registered www.usmollard.com and www.usmollards.net using a webhosing firm called www.hostreflex.com.  Did a considerable amount of searching around for a provider and ended up with either hostreflex or www.powweb.com.  The tie breaker was that hostreflex is hosted down in LA, has great backbone connectivity and they own the site and the servers, not a reseller.  Also, thier TOS was better laid out and they offered 25 mySQL Databases, something that if dad wants to run his little business out of, will be an adequate provider.  Look for this site to take a hike in the near future and move to www.usmollard.com. :-)

14 July 2003

Laguna Seca was pretty good this year.  Went down for Saturday and Sunday.  Sat had better racing IMHO, more action on the track and just better riding.  pretty sad when the local AMA guys put on a better show than the world Superbike riders.  Missing this year from WSB is just about everybody, no Colin Edwards, Haga, Bostrom bros., Nicky Haden, Miladin.  Sure, Miladin and one bostrom were there as wildecards, but by the second race both were gone and we were left to root for Erin Yates and Neil Hodgson - a Brit - Who both did just fine.  I'll stick some pix up later, have to get over the sunburn first.

11 July 2003

Ah, new site layout.  Not that it is close to being complete yet, but it is a start.  And, I think that it looks cleaner too, focuses the eye more on the content than on the galleries to either side of the page.  Still have to clear up problems with the list markers and some formatting issues with the top shortcut bar.  Overall, a decent start and with a bit of color splashed around, might look pretty good after a while.

7 July 2003

Nothing happening, just a quick update.  Not that anyone reads this.  New CSS book is working out well, just redid my Chem 6A site to use CSS almost exclusively.  Seems to be working well, but quirky in its application across browsers.  Sure does make it easier to not use tables especially once I figured out how to get the page to flow correctly using static positioning then to add sections using absolute positioning.  Do find myself using a lot more lists (ol and ul) to describe data and such.  Still working on the 'em' vs 'px' sizing debate and how to best implement it.  This page will probably be getting a revamp in the near future to use CSS...  

Only downside is that Dreaweaver 3, which has been my primary editing and site creation tool for the past few years does not handle css well.  And other programs like 1st page don't do text editing well. So I have to mix the two up to get the results I want: Dreamweaver for content creation and troubleshooting, 1st page for site building and checking.  Grrr.

The order just came down to go ahead and register a domain for the mollard webserver.  Dad wants the site to be called USMollards.. get it 'us'mollards - either geographical or group reference.  Guess he is sick of changing email all the time with Comcast/attbi/sbc/yahoo crap that is going on with Cable internet providers.  Checked availability for usmollards. com/net/us/org and they are all available, so now looking for webhost...

Have to find a site provider now, since hosting it at home would be a little tricky.  Comcast might come down on the cable connection if I run SMTP/POP/IMAP server off of the site.  So, hosting search is now on.

Uggh, still no permanant work.  Looking to either finding a postdoc to law school.  Going to start boning up on the LSAT stuff, sheez.

4 June 2003

Grading sux.  Finishing up the last three weeks of work, of which I was woefully underpaid for.  Real jobs are proving difficult to come by though, might have to go back to school or something.... say Patent Law?

As to hardware, nothing happening.  Bought a book on CSS2 and layout, so once I pick that up (after the 13th) the site will get a redo and touchup.  DaMollards will probably move onto a commercial server as Dad should be thinking of changing over to DSL at DaAbode.  Verison and SBC both offer service; both use PPPoE for IP which will make serving this site impossible.  Of course, might convince him to go with Speakeasy.net... lol.

New P2P app on the net looks good, Waste.  I have a copy of this nifty, secure, small P2P (50 client) application and you can DL it from the server.  There is no reason we could not set DaMollards up to run this as a service on the webserver, making it a secure way to share files without having to use relatively insecure FTP protocols.  But, why does it matter since noone seems to be interested in this stuff but me.  And I cannot even figure out why I have an interest in this stuff.

Been looking at home powerline solutions (HomePlug) to solve the range issue with the 802.11b wireless network.  Reasons are better thoughput the 802.11b, access to locations not currently covered by the 802.11b network, no wires to run, easy and inexpensive access to both bridges and nodes for flexible network design, i.e. no subnetting.  Disadvantages are that it is not an 100T solution, more like 10T or 5T, there might be problems with numbers of nodes and bridges and subnet issues that are not clear from the available literature.  Idealy I would need three bridges: one for the router, another in the family room and another for my network.  At minimum, one bridge and up to four nodes.  We could get away with running many of the systems as nodes on the network and using ICS or SyGate to route data through.  But, as has been reported with the netgear products, more than two nodes and throughput drops off.  Furthermore, I am not often at DaAbode these days: no sense in spending $ I don't have.  Kevin might have some application for this though as he has a real network problem in his home.

Www.practicallynetworked.com has reviews on a number of products, the Netgear (XA601, XE602) and Siemens (Speedstream SS2205,2521, 2502 and 2501) products look like ones to stay away from.  Linksys and D-Link seem to be getting the better reviews and are top of the list for purchase.  The Linksys bridge looks very good for connecting, but this is all in the future..... arrgh.

14 May 2003

Grrr.  Not much going on, working hard some of the time.  Changed the background colors as I was just plain sick of them.  Going to change the .gif headers to white on clear and the text color to #99ff43, which is a kinda sick green.  With white titles and mouseovers it will look a lot slicker than it does now.

10 May 2003

Completely fooked.  FZR is dead, metal in the oil means the engine will probably not last much longer.  No way I can replace it just now, not enough $ and no steady job means no financing at the great terms being offered right now.  Just learned that no employement for the summer means I am really fooked.  All spending stops now, again.  So, upgrades will have to go on with what I have already purchased.  Did get confirmation that Crucial replaced the defective stick of PC2100 RAM and got that in the mail earlier in the week.  Truck sounds like it has a cage of rabid squirrils under the hood.

I am so tired.

29 April 2003

Just purchased a copy of Windows XP Pro.  Feel like I just crossed into the dark side.  Yesterday, purchased a bunch of new watercooling stuff, since, if I want to bring a system down to school it will have to be extremely quiet.  So, new waterblock (DD Maze3), radiator (Extreme Pro) and a hydor L20 (185 gph) pump to go along with some new Tygon 3606 via-5 fingered discount.  This is going to go into the gaming/new system along with XP Pro and some memory when I can afford it; 256 Mb sucks.  OOps, gotta get that ram in the mail!  Crucial's great, called them up about a bad stick of ram, they gave me an RMA instantly and told me to send it back.  Cool.

Also bought a new waterblock and a set of hold downs for the improved workstation dualie which may get put together before the end of the year.  All the stuff was on discount, so why not.  Maze1 and new hold-downs for the waterblocks, three point this time so I can stop snapping off socket tabs.

23 April 2003

Why, oh why cannot any of my computers WORK!!  I am completely frustrated, nothing seems to work well.  When someone else goes to use any of my systems, they crash, wont install programs and are general pains' in the heiny.  Grrrr.  My sincerest apologies to those whom I have inconvienenced.

20 April 2003

New motherboard for the main system: ASUS A7N8X Deluxe.  Nvidia nForce2 chipset, all the bells and whistles: 1394 Firewire, 2 x Ethernet built in, 6.1 Dolby Sound, SATA, Dual channel DDR RAM, 6 x 2.0 USB.  That meant I could dump the SB Audigy and the Netgear TX311 cards, leaving just the Radeon 64 VIVO and the SCSI card occupying slots.  IRQ's are in short supply and getting the sound working proved to be a complete bitch.  Ended up reinstalling Win98SE then the drivers and doing a dance to get the video working.  Ugg.  I am impressed with the board though, rock solid all day once I sorted out that I had a bad stick of Crucial RAM - which was the reason for the new MB, it had some strange memory problem.

Good news is that I am working again, so the plan is to pick up a copy of WinXP Pro from school (I'm teaching) and update the systems to dual boot.  

Systems are going to change functionality.  My workstation will become a dual processor AMD system with my current XP 2100+'s, Radeon AIW from the file server and memory from the big system.  Going to hook this to my 21" monitor and a 19" to be purchased later.  The 21" will be on a KVM so that the gaming system can use it too.  The big system will get a new Barton 2400+ or an overclockable 1700+, two sticks of 512 Corsair XRB memory, Radeon 9x00 videocard with the A7N8X motherboard and will primarily be my gaming system.  Probably make the switch to SATA RAID via IDE adapters for the gaming system and migrate some equipment (1.2 Duron) to the server.

Getting more and more enthustiastic about the nForce.  Seems to have everything on one system including adequate graphics for cheap ($79).  If I have to build systems for family members, I'll go the way of the nForce integrated solution and keep my life simple.

27 Feb 2003

Moved the site onto the home server.  Changed the front page around a bit, updated it.  Really am not liking most of my life at the moment.

21 Feb 2003

This site is probably going to come down in the next few weeks.  After six years, not a bad run considering most web content does not last six months.  It's been kinda fun.

1 Feb 2003

DAmn.  Last week I commented on the Challenger disaster, now I have to comment on the Columbia disaster.

The TV NEWS SUCKS!!!!  Typical puff coverage by a bunch of insincere idiots pandering to the imbecilic nature of the american public.  I cannot believe they think we are all this stupid.

28 Jan 2003

Today was the aniversary of the Challenger disaster.  Lets all remember all the folks who passed in pursuit of the dream of space.

I watched that shuttle go up live.  I was home sick, it sucked.  I could not believe what I was seeing.  Dumbstruck would be a good word (I never recovered).

8 Jan 2003

Nothing happening here.  Going to get Kevin hooked up with a network in his house; I managed to get his kids hooked on multiplayer games.  Just trying to keep things running at home, no major problems so far.  The main comp upgrade is on indefinite hold, the spare XP2100+ will be up on eBay shortly along with the older 1.2 GHz AMD.  The file server got an OS upgrade from Win98SE to Win2000.  The system was unstable due to IRQ problems, the upgrade to 2K cured some of those problems as it manages IRQ's far more efficiently than 98.  Also drilled a few holes(4) in the front of the case which dropped case temp about 6C.

9 Dec 2002

Sold both of the Soyo boards for a total of $316.  In the end I managed to get two XP2100+ processors for the price of one out of this deal.  Looking now for an MSI K7D Master-L board to do the dual setup.  Oh, and a copy of XP Pro and a Radeon 9700 Pro....

25 Nov 2002

Got a smoking deal at Fry's over the weekend.  Soyo KY-KT400 DRAGON Ultra Platinum Edition motherboard and an Athlon XP 2100+ processor for $199.  Retail the mb is $179 and the processor $99.  Stuck the motherboard up on eBay, should be able to get $120 for it, break even is $105.  Swapped the processor into the KT333 DRAGON Ultra Lite AKA the big system and pumped it up to 1885 MHz (2400+) with a 145 MHz FSB.  Didn't unlock the processor, really did not need to. Does Seti units in 3:55, down from 4:55-5:15, temps are 37-39 with a room temp of 22.  Cool (literally)

5 Nov 2002

OK, made some minor changes, but I still hate this layout.  Everything seems to be working OK, but the big system is doing some funny random reboots.

If you want to see the current stuff.............*

26 Oct 2002

I REALLY hate this layout.

Not working on a new layout at all other than a new header for this page.  Not working on hardware, everything is just running peachy.  (Famous last words).  

bzzzzt....

What's that smell?

2 Oct 2002

I hate this layout.

Working on a new layout kinda part time.  Want to make it php/mySQL driven so that updating is easier and more convenient.  This badly needs some graphics and a 'theme' too.  Working on that.  Moved some sites off the hardware info side to reflect my changing interests.  Stay tuned, or don't.

Nothing going on re: hardware.  Worked on the server, mainly drilling a 3.5" hole in the front cover to improve airflow.  Also cut the one piece cover into two pieces which will facilitate maintenance.  Did it as a test case for the upstairs comp, which shares the same case.  I'll post some pix later.  

7 Aug 2002

Both IBM drives are under warranty, good news sort of.  Problem now is whether to try to recover data from them.  

5 Aug 2002

The 60 Gb IBM drive on the server is dying.  Found that out yesterday when, while rebooting the system, I unplugged the drive, no whine, plugged it in, whine.  Diagnosis, bad bearing in this IBM GXP60.  Two dead, one dying and six IBM drives in Limbo.

30 July 2002

Minor repairs to the main system finally got it up and running, but it is not up to full speed just yet.  Still having a problem with a 9.1 Gb IBM drive, it occasionally is not detected by the SCSI card.  An 80 pin SCA drive, the adapter does not fit 100% so occasionally the connection gets interrupted.  Most annoying is that the system will not reboot if you tell it to, it just stops.  No reboot.  Have to turn the power off completely, let it set for ten seconds and reboot; then I'll get it to start.  Might have something to do with the fact that the system was overvolted when I shorted the floppy drive onto the chassis a few months.  None of the LED's work on the case, so it might be a problem with the switches.  Going to have to run to Fry's or it's equivalent.

22 July 2002 - Disaster Strikes!

Late last week, on a dark and stormy night...  Sorry, wrong beginning.  Last Friday, main system got a huge voltage spike from my now disconnected APC650 Pro: when the system came back online, the 18 Gb IBM SCSI 10K $300 drive would not spin up.  Well, it would spin up, but it whines, loudly. Actually, it had been whining for a few weeks prior, but I kept telling myself that it is my imagination.  I can no longer hear out of my left ear.   Tried numerous tweaks to get the drive back online with no success.  Then the system started 'losing' HD partitions and not booting.  Removed the wireless card, network card and did some rebooting with no success, the 18 Gb drive would not even spin up.  Tried to boot the drive with my alternate system, but it would not detect the drive, gave an error with 'could not spin up the drive.'  Conclusion: dead ($300) drive.

Unfortunately, the failed drive held all my pictures and photographs, most of my data and lots of information.  Arrrgh!  The system, after removal of the HD, just got more and more hinky.  Put my 60 Gb HD from the firewire portable into the system to try to get more storage, but that too started coming up with bad blocks and clusters.  Some of the data was recoverable, but still, lost a lot with that drive failing.  Plus, the system was randomly losing the FD and the IDE channels.  After that fail-safe BIOS settings were the only way that the system would boot.  Any changes from fail-safe settings would cause the system to hang on boot or during OS loading. Conclusion: Bad motherboard.

With my money situation being kinda tight, I splurged and picked up a Soyo KT333 Dragon Lite+ ($59 on sale!) motherboard and a Maxtor D740Lx 60 Gb 7.2K HD ($72 on sale too!) to replace the failed SCSI drive.  Deleted the hardware key in windows, installed the new MB, booted into windows and started reinstalling hardware devices.  No problems so far, most everything installed easily.  The Maxtor drive went in next, partitioned into a 18.6 and 37.2 Gb partitions, formatted with FAT32.  Copied the data from my 18 GB Seagate SCSI drive on to the Maxtor and f-disked that sucker!  The Seagate had a strange problem with the FAT table, as fdisk only showed 2 partitions of 3.  Finally managed to get it sorted out and the drive partitioned and formatted into a single drive (my new D:).

Now for the hard part, installing software.  Slow, arduous, boring.  The good news is that mail in the Netscape folder was saved as was IE settings and many of the other settings from other software was recovered.  Bad news is that I am just now compiling a list of data that is gone.  All the archives from the websites, NMR data from the Diyl trap experiments done with RDL at SB, CV data, most of my recent .doc files, saved games and more.  That is what is going to hurt.

Also, this new motherboard is just not overclocking friendly.  The 1.33 GHz T-bird that is in there used to run at 145 FSB (1.46 GHz), but it no longer works at that frequency.  Moving the RAM and processor voltages to 2.6 and 1.85 V respectively did not effect any change.  Hrumph.  Does work at 1.4 GHz with a multiplier change at default voltage though.  Very strange.  And, there is only five PCI slots, not six as was in the EPoX 8KHA+ so the wireless card got the axe.  Too bad, so sad.

17 July 2002

Hey, benchtest.com is back up.  Cool.

12 July 2002

Actually, don't know the reason for this update, just thought it had been a while since my last note.  Both systems and the NT server all seem to be running fine.  Air temps are taking thier toll on the server since it sits in the garage and it is overclocked a bit (800@1000).  It crashed last week (the 5th) while I was in Santa Barbara but I could not find a reason why.  Strange since it was 108F in the garage wedensday and it did not crash.  I think that it should be made into a watercooled box to help survive the heat.  Big system is still crashing when playing Return to Castle Wolfenstien multiplayer.  No idea what to fix...

I am thinking it is time for a site redesign.  Got some new fonts for photoshop so might try them out.  Also, been working for RDL in SB doing some diyl trapping reactions, fun fun.

WSB this weekend!!!  Look for new pictures on DaMollards on monday.

7 June 2002

Fixed a number of problems with the home network and computers.  The router/file server is no longer a router.  The sygate software router was not doing its job well; crashing the computer and preventing clean shutdowns, it got nixed.  The 'big' system got its own wireless network card, an SMC 2632W that was not doing well in the garage NT4 server.  Performance is OK in the new system, but ping times are up from the software router solution, from 45 ms to RtCW servers to ~110 ms.  I suck anyway, so it doesnt really matter too much.

The file server got a new processor and an old motherboard, Duron 1.2 GHz/IWill KK266.  If you remember the IWill motherboard was in the big system for about 8 months until system stability got to be a problem.  Turns out system stability was an OS problem, not a problem for the motherboard.  New upgrade is working OK, but for some reason it will not run Norton defragmenter on the IBM GXP60-60 Gb HD.  I am concerned due to the bad failure reputation that the GXP60 has.  Ah, well, can't afford to replace it right now.  A problem with a 120 mm fan has cropped up too, it does not run at 7V for some reason.  I suspect that it may be the Antec power supply, which is rated at 300W but may not be producing enough amperage on the 12V or 5V rail.  Voltage looks OK, about 12.02 and 4.87 respectively.  Probably will replace the switch with a cheapie rheostat from Radio shack which will give me a variation of 12-6.5 V from the 12 V rail, which should reduce some of the stress on the 5 V rail.  This system needs some work, it is a complete rats nest inside the computer - wires everywhere!  Next weeks project I guess, along with reinstalling the OS is cleaning up the inside of the computer...

25 April 2002

Got some legal advice off of Fuckedcompany.com about legal rights in California.  I love walking by these guys in Fry's or BestBuy.

"For those of you living in Cali who hate the fucking people who check your bag at the door. In California the property laws state that ownership changs when the money changes hands. Since you pay at the register, your bag and merchandise are now your property. If you don't want to show your bag to the people at the door you do not have to. Most people just show their bags at the door because most people are sheep. Often times stores have a sign saying they "reserve the right to check bags..." blah blah blah. This is bullshit because they cannot reserve a right that they do not have in the first place. It would be like me saying I reserve the right to look at your wife naked. Since they do not have the right to search you or your bag the only thing they can legally do is hold you and wait for the police. If they forcibly search you or your bag you can sue. If they hold you and wait for the cops they better have damn good evidence showing they had reason to believe you were shoplifting otherwise you can sue them for illegal detainment or false arrest.

This doesn't apply at places like Costco where you are a member of a "club" because in your membership papers you signed when you joined it says that you will submit to the searches. Non-membership places like Best Buy and Fry's have no legal grounds to search your bags. Walk past them, they hate it but there's nothing they can legally do.

17 April 2002

which "monty python and the holy grail" character are you?
this quiz was made by colleen

I love these things.

Score for the weekend - BMW:2 Squirrils:0.  Damn bastards had a death wish!

7 April 2002

Mountain Mikes pizza is far better than Papa Johns.  Then again, it would be tough to beat the crappiness that is papa johns.

Update: 8 April 2002 - It is even good cold!

6 April 2002

	You are Beaker! You are very quiet, and your vocabulary mostly consists of a series of beeps. You don't assert yourself; because of this, you have a tendency to get hurt.
Take the What Muppet Are You? Quiz!

emememeeeememememememeeeemeek.... boom!

1 April 2002

NEVER EAT AT PAPA JOHNS.  It is officialy the Worst Pizza available.  Yitch!

Update: 4 April 2002  Even cold it tastes like crap.

26 March 2002

The king is dead!!  Long live the King!

One of my favorite, albiet rarely updated, sites - benchtest.com - is gone.  Victim of the rapidly increasing cost of bandwidth.  I am going to miss that site, he had been around since the good old days of celeron 300A overclocking and he was extremely through and scientific in his testing and reviews.  So long www.benchtest.com, you are missed.

18 March 2002

Big system got a complete format C:.  Not a good experience for any one of us, but for the most part the system is running, but the graphics system is in terrible shape.  Artifacts, stuttering and crap performance is what I have been experiencing.  Whenever ATi gets off their collective butts and gets a new set of drivers out, I am first on the download list.

Some bad news on a second front; IBM drives are only supposed to run 333 h a month! ahahahhhahhaha.  A total of five of these drives populate my computers, three of which are in my server (2 x 75 GXP-15Mb RAID, 1 x 60 GXP-60 Mb storage), one in my file box (60 GXP-60Mb) and a 60 GXP-60Mb in a portable firewire enclosure.  Fortunately this problem does not translate over to their SCSI drives, otherwise my big system and the file server would be would also be in a world of hurt.  In fact, the only non-IBM HD currently in service is an 18.1 Gb Seagate SCSI drive in my big server.  There are a number of articles on this issue at a number of sites - here is a quick summary: VIAHardware, Overclockers.com - can't find any other articles at the moment.  Gotta sign off -job hunting.

Update: 19 March 2002 - More links for you, the Tech-Report has probably the best info and commentary, read their article.  Just wanted to let you know that all five of my 60 and 75 GXP's are running just fine - even the one in the firewire enclosure.  Guess the recommended replacement is the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X drives, at least according to the Tech-Report.  

14 Feb 2002

Still having hang problems on boot into win98.  Not as bad as it was before, but enough to warrant three or four retries until I get a good boot.  Tekram has a new driver for the 390U3W card that should have cured the problem, since there is a known issue with CD players on the SCSI-2 channel.  But it did not.  Might also be a BIOS issue with the tekram card, but with no floppy drive in the system and me being too lazy to make a bootable CD, no BIOS update.

I am beginning to suspect that my Win98 install is bad.  But damn, it is such a hassle to format the C drive and reinstall everything from scratch.  Should just get a copy of Win2K and bump the OS up to something a little more current.  Unemployment sucks.

Other than that (and no job), no issues.  New drivers for the Radeon improved both visual quality and gameplay.  Going to start writing up the watercooler system so that I have some record of it, lord knows there are enough pictures of me building it.

Did pick up a Firewire/USB2 enclosure and an IBM 60 Gb 60GXP to move data around between home and work.  With over 1 Gb of pictures per amplifier documentation set, the laptop's 6 Gb drive was quickly overwhelmed.  The firewire connection to the HD is very fast, the USB one is very slow.  Picked up an Adaptec FireConnect (AFW-1430) card to connect the laptop via firewire, works quite well. Heck, not much else to say.

26 Dec 2001

IRQ woes plague the new Epox 8KHA+.  With the addition of a Soundblaster Audiology soundcard, a gift from Mom and Dad, the system started to hang for 1-2 minutes during boot and while accessing the internet.  It would also fail to boot unless the system was turned off and let sit around for an hour.  Quick web search and message board perusal led to better BIOS settings for the memory and the realization that an IRQ conflict might be causing my problem.

The starting setup for PCI slots was

AGP - Radeon
Slot1 - empty
Slot2 - empty
Slot3 - Tekram 390U3W
Slot4 - empty
slot5 - Soundblaster Audiology
Slot6 - Netgear TX310

PCI slot 1 is shared with AGP and a card cannot be put there due to the HSF unit on the videocard.  Slot2 is not shared with anything and would be the ideal location for the Tekram 390U3W but the HSF unit from the Radeon prevents installation.  Slot 3 and 5 share an IRQ as do slots 4 and 6.  With the onboard IDE controller disabled, there are three free IRQ's, but the trick is to get them allocated and the system stable.

Reassigned the IRQ's and rearranged the PCI cards in the following order - working flawlessly so far.

AGP  - Radeon           IRQ11
Slot1 - empty              IRQ11
Slot2 - empty              Auto
Slot3 - Tekram           IRQ5
Slot4 - Soundblaster IRQ9
Slot5 - empty             (IRQ5)
Slot6 - Netgear           IRQ9

22 Dec 2001

Started a page about building an 802.11b antenna (located on different server - might not be up) for better coverage in the house.

Replaced the IWill board in the big system with an Epox 8KHA+ and 512 Mb Crucial DDR RAM.  It seems much faster and the startup hangs have gone away.  With the bridges closed the system runs at 1463 (1.80 V) stable as a rock at 38 °C.  This is an AHYAH 1.33 GHz AMD system, watercooled.

I am going to have to dig out my DOS RAM drive information, since Win98SE can only realisticly use 192 Mb of RAM.

30 Nov 2001

If I was an Autobot, I'd be:

Take the Transformers personality test at android5.com!

17 Nov 2001

An intel application called, ironicly enough 'application accelerator' is up on the inhell website.  With a claimed 10-30% increase in applicaiton speed it was worth giving it a try.  My ASUS CSUCL-2/CelII-600 combo did not complain and now I can watch stutter free DVD's with SETI running in the background.  I have a page up to give you shortcuts to most of the important inhell sites, along with links to the place where you can download the files.  Be forewarned, you must install a chipset program prior to the application accelerator, but the download size is less than 500K.  Cheers!

15 Nov 2001

Well, this sucks.  Down at work wanted to put in a RAID 1 array to duplicate data in a mission critical computer.  Anyway, things went terribly wrong and ended up taking the disk down to a data recovery specialist to get the files back.  Ouch, cost me 2.5K for that little mistake and three days worth of sleep.  Swapped the blockquote tags out of this page to css to see if the page gets a little nicer to look at.

No money, no job, no computer stuff, no life.  Just about finished at svpa.  The NT4 server is up and humming along nicely.  Most of the broken computers have been fixed.  I must make one point, but for business apps, the SIS-620 chipset sure is a nice solution.  Cheap boards, computers are stable with win98SE and perform wel, but not very fast...  Still looking for ways to automate thier backup processeses, but there seems to be a couple of freeware solutions to that problem.

Always verify the integrity of you Ghost images before moving forward and risking mission critical data.

28 Oct 2001

Actually, it turns out that the problem most likely lies in the motherboard as all my DIMMS give the same error, even ones that are known to be good by testing in the server box.  Don't know WTF is wrong, I suspect the motherboard, but purchasing a new one and putting DDR memory in it right now is financially improbable.  Swapped the SCSI-DVD out of the big box and into the router/server box since my Adaptec-2940-U2W is in there running the OS and couldn't find a friggin' 50-pin SCSI-2 cable, which I know is around here somewhere.  Eventually found it, stuffed it in and got my DVD player running for the first time in months.  This system is now the poster child for how not to route-run cables.  Spaghetti fest to say the least....

Working on dad's new NT4 server for work.  What a chore, lots of work and I have no idea if the server is set up right.  At least IIS is not installed, and there is no net access to the system so security is not much of a question.  Well, playing with NT 4 is fun, finally got it updated to current conditions and it is running pretty/very stable.  Gonna leave it on for a few days and see how it goes.

19 Sept 2001

Crap, just found out that the memory is a piece of shit.  Norton (I know, it is norton) gives a memory error at some funky, messed up register.  Nutz, guess swapping some memory around is in order, turns out that a memory problem will prevent the system from booting up or hanging during boot.  Crap.

11 Aug 2001

For the first time in six weeks, this update comes to you from the Big system.  I still am not real clear on what the problem was, the system would lock up upon boot upon GUI (Win98) startup.  Eventually, relocated the Netgear card and removed the SB Live! and enabled the onboard sound.  This was ineffective.  Removed the USR ISA 56K modem also with no effect.  At this point I found out that the system was only running Win98, not the SE version; dragging out a copy of Win98SE it got installed and updated via Windows Update.  No difference, it was still locking up at GUI start.  Went up to Via 4-in-1 ver 4.32, rebooted, and then disabled the IDE controller in BIOS, still no change although now there are no IRQ conflicts.

Checked the SCSI ID's just to be sure, then enabled 66 MHz PCI freq with the Tekram card, rebooted and cleared all the defaults on in the SCSI bios; no change.  Removed the two CD's from the SCSI-2 channel and low and behold, the system rebooted without lockup five times in a row.  Reinstalling the CD's started the system crashing again, three times in five.  Checked the termination, connections and the cables and that seemed to do the trick.  Five restarts and no crashes, but my fingers are crossed and the system seems very stable.

The server was also running Win98 so it was also upgraded to Win98SE and updated.  the wrench was thrown in when the TV player got a yellow exclaimation in sys. properties, reinstalled the driver which got rid of the yellow exclaimation point, but the TV player still did not work.  Reinstalled Dx8a, Dx8 runtime and Dx8 video capture updates along with driver 7115 and multimedia center 4.1.0 got the TV working again.  Extra bonus, the DVD player still works too.  This system really needs a faster processor, 600 MHz celeron is just not cuttin it these days.

2 Aug 2001

On a different note, my DVD/file server has never been successfully able to play DVD's.  Defeats the point eh?  Anyway, I was pissed off about it the other night after the monitor blew up and decided to fix it.  Reinstalled Dx8.0a, Dx8 runtime update and the Dx8 video capture update; no change.  The ATI DVD player starts but then fast forwards through the movie and stops, leaving you unable to play the movie or really do anything.  All the usual tricks with changing settings around in the program and lowering timing defaults in BIOS (AGP speed, aperature size and main memory timings) all gave no response.

Went back to the ATI site to get some guidance, where it finaly became evidant that there were no ready answers.  One of the troubleshooting articles said to make sure that the player was the master on the secondary IDE channel, mine was set to slave.  Swapped it over but still no luck getting it working.  Then I remembered that there was a pioneer 6x IDE DVD player in the closet; it had been removed from a friends computer and replaced because it was making funny noises and not playing DVD's right.  In it went, set it as the master and viola, the DVD player works.  Watched Mission to Mars (grade C) and a bit of the 5th Element (grade A+) before passing out.

28 July 2001

Arrrgh, put in the new SCSI controller, no difference.  While all the drives now run at 160 Mb/s, the system is still very unstable and still spontaneously reboots when shutdown.  I believe that this may be related to three problems - 1.) a bad motherboard or 2.) a bad SCSI HD (My 18 GB drive) 3.) low voltage from the new powersupply.  The PS problem is particularly troubling, the Enermax 451 W unit only puts out 4.76 V on the 5 V rail, far less than the 350 W Enermax that I took out of the unit.

The plan is to first replace the fanbus with rheostats.  The reason being that with a rheostat, the voltage is lowered by the coil within the rheostat, no some funky electrical trick with the powersupply like the fanbus uses now.  Rheostats are cheap, I can still use the current fanbus grid located within the case and wiring the unit up should only take an hour or so.  Next course of action would be to swap the old PS for the new and see if it is the problem (that might be the first thing to try actually) and finally, check the motherboard out or get it replaced.  Unfortunately, it is now out of RMA date, so buying a new one is the only option.  If the HD is whacked, I am screwed.  Hasta.

19 July 2001

Got my new Tekram 390U3W for installation in my system.  Woot!  Woot!

11 July 2001

Got a lot accomplished this past week.  Built a new watercooling box, stripped the big computer down to bare metal and cleaned it up and finally tried to reassemble the computer.  Phew, busy.

Now the bad news.  Busted a cap off my Adaptec 2940U2W.  This sucks.  I can't afford to replace it with another adaptec unit, but a Tekram DC-390U2W is within my price range and gives me SCSI-3 capability for all my SCSI-3 HD's.  This is not what I wanted to spend $ on, I was looking forward to spending the $200 on a new pair of 40 GB IBM 60GXP drives for my RAID system. grrr.

 

Might be able to solder the cap back on, but this is a surface mount component and my soldering gun has 1. too fat of a tip and 2. too much power.  Have to pop down to work and see if they have the required equipment.

Tried to do the repair myself at home and it looks good - pretty easy to do but the tricky bit was not getting a cold solder joint.  Unfortunately the cap looks like it has been disrupted in its case so it might sill be inoperative.  Still getting the Windows Protection Error upon bootup even after a fresh format and OS reinstall.  *waves white flag*  Off to buy a Tekram part, looks like they have the DC-390U3W for $194 and $10 off at amazon..... *opens wallet*

5 July 2001

Busy few days after getting back from SB.  Main system nuked itself, more about that later - which will be a two part job, new H2O cooler and then fixing the box.  Disassembled the computer from dad's work and plopped a 250 Watt Enermax PS in along with an old WD 5.1 GB HD out of the LINUX box, unfortunately it was still formatted for LINUX.  Tried to fdisk it, it reported that a logical disk existed and thus it could not remove the partition - shit, gave up and tried different HD's (4 total), but never found any that worked.  Grabbed my copy of RH 7.1, fired that off with the WD 5.1 and got to their fdisk utility which let me clean out the LINUX partitions.  Got Win98SE in, got a load of driver updates from the web after installing an SMC2602 (PCI card w/ PCMCIA 802.11b card), got windows updated and the new drivers in - it works like a charm.

One point to note was the stock HSF unit, which it itself is not at all a bad unit.  Evidently this computer started crashing a lot, to the point that it became unusable and was then used for spare parts.  Under the HSF unit was a shitty thermal pad, no, worse, it was double sided thermal tape.  When the system was running, the HSF was not even warm to the touch.  The 433 Celeron is a hot running chip with a broad surface area (Katamani core) and the HS should have at least been warm.  Stripped the thermal pad out and put on a dollop of Arctic Silver, whoa, the HSF is HOT!  What a difference, but since the system did not exhibit any instability in my hands only time will tell....

Started on the big system update by building a powerstrip with a 12V relay attached.  This should solve the problem of switching on the water pump prior to startup, since when system power comes up, the relay gets thrown and the powerstrip, which will have the H2O cooler's pump and AT PS/12V fans hooked in.

The new water cooling box to house the pump, reservoir and radiator - the old one only had a single 120 mm fan in a modified fishing tackle box and was just not set up well.  Good enough it was for a first try, but not very good looking and it was LOUD.  The new box is based on an old AT case which will have the sides cut out, the reservoir mounted internally, two 120 mm fans (7/12V), water and air intake temperature monitoring - and whatever else comes along.

Building the box took almost 2 days - way too much work, one thing after another.  Stripping out the AT MB tray sucked, this old POS case was spot welded together, which requires drilling out all the welds.  And, the system is made of some tough-ass steel.  I wrecked a good 1/4" drill bit before I wizened up and started adding 3-in-1 oil to help cutting.  Anyway, it got built and everything got crammed in.  A 12/7 V baybus was built but the PS fails to give a full 12 V on that rail, so the fans run at 8.6 and 2.3 V, I will have to pick up a different PS.  The mix in the system is 80/20 water/antifreeze with 2 oz. waterwetter in a total of 1 liter of solution.  The fans have a funny resonance together at 8.6 V, but they do pump out some air.  With a new PS giving 12/7 V the amount of air from the 7 V should be sufficient to keep the AHYAH 1.4 GHz T-Bird cool.  This is the first part of the rebuild, the next part is going to take the big box down, completely remove all the components and fix all the little problems such as rough edges and vibrating parts.

More pictures and outlines of how and what I did at a later date - keep an eye on the table to the left. C-ya

11 June 2001

Got my sisters system up and running nicely.  There were some concerns over the FIC 503+ MB that ended up in the system, but the problem turned out to be with an old PC100 ECC DIMM that was giving parity errors and crashing the system.  Replaced it with a Crucial PC133 DIMM (128 MB) and had absolutely no problems with the system after that.

Ended up purchasing an external USRobotics 56K V.92 modem for them, what a fantastic piece of hardware.  It is blazingly fast, even on poor quality phone lines and setup easy.  I am impressed.  I wish that an ISA modem could have been found but all the modems for sale in the computer stores were cheap WinModems, which with only 400 MHz behind it would have put undo strain on the CPU.  The larger of my systems has an old USR 56Kx2 V.90 ISA modem and it still works great.  There is even an upgrade to the V.92 standard for that modem, fantastic for a 3 year old ISA modem.

Ordered up an IWill KK266 motherboard along with a 1.33 GHz AHYAY core T-Bird to do the big upgrade.  PCNut supplied me with the motherboard and chip in record time, 2 days.   Unfortunately I have to go out of town for 2 weeks and it looks like I will not have a chance to setup the new toy.  It is not something I want to do fly by night either, as water-cooling looks like it will be almost mandatory for this upgrade.  Needless to say the case needs some attention before putting the new system in, since I cobbled in the H2O system with the K7.  This calls for taking everything out of the case, putting in the 431W Enermax PS and cleaning up the through-case holes for the external radiator.  A rethink of fan placement and switches would also be a good idea.  The 10K SCSI hard drives could do with relocating to a position with better cooling which will require fabrication of a new set of brackets.  A bit of a project, it should keep me busy for the better part of a weekend.

Along with the new motherboard, a new Computer is on the way here.  Gateway was having an excellent sale on 6400 series servers.  PIII-933, 9 GB 7.2K SCSI, 128 MB RAM, dual CPU capable: $500 - what a deal.  Figured that either I could use it as a web/FTP server here at home or let my dad have it for his work, since he needs a new server at the office.   Bumped the HD up to 18 GB for an additional $100, since I need more storage here at home.  At the very least the CPU, HD and case can be cannibalized for use in other systems.  Too good of a deal to pass up.  Well, I am outta here...

30 May 2001

Its HOT!  Phew, 11pm and 94F in my room.  The CelII is beeping at 48C and the Duron hits 50C if working hard.  Of course, this was on the quiet fan settings, on the more aggressive settings (read, noisy) the CelII drops to 41, but the Duron still peaks at 48C under load.  I have got to get watercooling back (and some AC)...

Still no memory for my sisters system, looks like I will end up driving down to SB tomorrow instead of taking the train (ugh).  UPS still shows the memory in-transit with delivery tomorrow.  I just got back from a one-day round trip to Chico to pick the bike up, that sucked.  A downright chilly 96 in Chico, but Vacaville was 115 and my truck was hating it due to the heat (I was too since there is no AC!).  Too hot for me!  

27 May 2001

After 2 weeks, the laptop came back.  The motherboard was burned out and the heatsink needed to be replaced along with something else.... Can't remember what right now.  Anyway, I guess the moral of this episode is not to buy Compaq laptops, quality and service sucks.

I am in the market for a new laptop, to replace my current one and provide desktop replacement for work and the office.  Dell has an excellent reputation with laptops and everyone who I know who has one loves it and has had no problems whatsoever with the systems.  Before I buy though, two things are going to have to occur; the mobile Athlon4 will have to be in it along with a Radeon or GeForceII graphics chipset.  I want a system that is going to be extremely powerful and be able to do high quality DVD and reasonable gaming too.  Sounds like a tall order and it may be that 6 months will pass until the prices come down.  I can wait.

The gateway got a major OS reinstall a few weeks ago.  The one mistake I made was not updating the WD8.3 GB HD, it is a particularly slow ATA-33 version.  I have a 10.1 GB IBM ATA-66 drive that would be a perfect replacement but since I did not crack the case in the reinstall putting it in would mean more downtime.  Figuring that it would be quicker to install the OS on the WD, when opening the case for some other reason in the future the WD could be ghosted onto the IBM and the drives swapped - problem solved.  Come to think of it, having that drive in the LINUX web/FTP server would be a good idea, since it would allow me to put more data on the FTP server - interesting thought.

26 May 2001

I HATE WINMODEMS!  My sister brought back my old P-90 system, the modem (14.4K) is too slow for websites and a general upgrade into the late 1990's would be nice.  Set it up with an FIC503+, AMD K6-2(400). 64 Mb ECC PC100 RAM - defective of course - Voodoo3-2000, 4X CD, Floppy, 2.3 GB WD HD, mouse, KB - nothing special.  Being the kind and generous person that she is, my sister provided me with a generic 56K modem she picked up somewhere for $9 (warning #1).  I got the system up and stable with Win98SE and a netgear TX310 for LAN access, updated everything, got the HD defragged and it checked for viruses and everything checked out OK.

Thus looms the task of getting this modem installed.  Popping the generic box open I was met by the standard stuff, CD, some cables, pathetic manual and the modem - which looked awful small (warning #2).  Stuffed it in, fired it up and installed the provided drivers. But nothing showed up in the network properties box, uninstalled, reinstalled - no luck.  Going back and looking at the manual provided no insight and there was not much on the web.  I found the chipset manufacturer (PCTel) and a set of drivers for the HSP56 micromodem.  Ugh, new drivers didn't work, changing com ports, IRQ, PCI slot, sticking the old modem in and seeing if that would kick it over; no luck.  After searching about on the web some more, turns out that HSP stands for Host Signal Processing - ugh, a winmodem of the worst kind.  Feeling guilty about even considering giving this POS back to my sister, I made a trip down to Fry's and picked up a lovely USR 56K V.92 external modem.  Works great, highly recommended.  

I still have an old USR ISA V.90x2 modem in my main system that was purchased a few years ago and upgraded to V.90.  Connection speeds are excellent.  And, there is a V.92 upgrade available for it, so if you ever come across these old ISA 56Kx2 USR modems, pick them up they are as good as gold.  That is actually the piece of equipment that I wanted to pick up at Fry's, but they only sell USR PCI modems - which suspiciously look, and are priced, like winmodems.

16 April 2001

Worked on the FOP-38; it needed to be lapped, badly.  Started with 220 grit and worked through 400 and finished with 600.  As expected after lapping with only 600 grit, he finish is not mirror-like in the slightest, but the HS is noticeably flatter after lapping.  I installed it onto the CelII, rebooted and realized that damn Black-label Delta 60 mm fan sounded like a hairdryer on overload.  Shutdown and replaced the fan with a YS tech 60 mm which is far quieter.  Unfortunately, even with the new HS and 1.70V, I still cannot hit 900 MHz with any kind of stability.   Running at 800 MHz (90 MHz FSB, 1.70V)was possible for a short period, but again the system became unstable and stopped responding to keyboard and mouse inputs thus the system was restored to 600 MHz/1.5V (boo!).  The new Asus CSUL2-C MB might do the trick though, allowing for possible higher overclocks.  The Dangerden Maze slot A waterblock that will hopefully soon grace my Duron also got some TLC from the sandpaper, which it needed.  Staring with 400 grit paper was a mistake though, there is far more material to be removed than can be effectively accomplished with 400.

Tax day here again.  I hope my tax guy filed an extension for me.

The laptop is still dead.  The problem was that I needed to perform a quick restore, but not from the Emergency Recovery CD.  To do a quick restore I had to order the 2-CD set from Compaq ($10) and have it shipped ($15).  Got it overnight, did the system restore and while stability improved, it still crashes.  There was a boot sector error that scandisk found, but I still get OS lockups and the 'white screen of death.'   Contacted Compaq again, they were going to send out a box for me to pack the laptop into for warranty return.  This thing is gone as of May (the warranty runs out).  My next laptop will have the Radeon video chipset, which will make it truly a desktop replacement.

Computer fair last weekend; I picked up one of the well reviewed ASUS CSUL2-C to replace the BH2 rev 1.0 that is currently fitted in my DVD/entertainment/NFS system.  A GlobalWin FOP-38 was also procured to replace the poorly fitting Alpha currently on the BH2/CelII-600, which might explain its poor stability at 900 MHz  Also picked up one of the highly coveted Enermax 430W powersupplies.  This PS is slated for the Duron system, whose PS will get swaspped into the CelII system on the idea that eventually the Duron will get passed down too.  I was also planning on picking up a 1.0 GHz 266 MHz FSB AXIA code Thunderbird.   Surprisingly most of the vendors were either unwilling or unable (i.e. retail packaging) to let me examine the core codes of their T-birds, thus no sale.  It might be best to wait until motherboards built upon a DDR chipset hit the market.  But 1.5 GHz is calling my name.....   Realistically, I do not really need all that speed.  Guess all that MHz is just to compensate for my lacking in other areas....

What else....  The LINUX box is still down, turns out I am hopeless with the alternate OS thing.  I found a new book on setting up LINUX boxes, so off to try again.  Guess I found my limitations.  Also been looking at learning PHP for SSI's on my websites - not like I have anything else to do in my life.  I spend too much time on this damn hobby.

Well, hell. The laptop died.  This is the second time and the problem is exactly the same as the first time it died.  I have been in contact with Compaq and they have been reasonable about replacement.  Unfortunately, I had to get the system restore disk and reinstall the operating system prior to Compaq even considering a return for hardware replacement.  The system restore disk was in the Bay Area, I was in SB, thus I had to wait until today to get my hands on the disk and reformat the drive.  Reinstalling the OS did nothing to help the system, it is unstable again.  *Dials 1-800-OK-Compaq*  hemm deee dummmmb.

Another month wasted.  Some minor changes to hardware.  I ordered and received an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon card for the Celeron file server system.  The card cost $230 direct from ATI through their trade-up program.  I also received a mail in rebate, which, when accompanied with an old video card and sent back to ATI, $30 will be refunded to me, a nice deal IMHO.  Fortunately I have a bucketload of old videocards, including the original Orchid 1 Mb VLB card that came with my first PC, a 486DX4-66.  

Installation of the ATI card was a royal pain in the rearend, the system did not properly detect one of the subsystems and thus, the TV tuner, decoder etc. Was not properly detected.  I finally got it all installed, but the TV-On-Demand and a couple of other subprograms do not work.  The TV tuner and DVD player do work just fine however; I am watching TV on it right now.  I also put the 64 Mb Radeon in the big system, which also turned out to be a disaster install. I still cannot get some of the hardware components to work correctly.  Fortunately, the DVD player works as does most of the fancy Radeon bits.  Framerates have improved and the 2D performance is much better than with the GeForce256.  I am going to have to spend some time messing with the hardware setup to get everything to work just right.  Cannot say that I would recommend ATI cards to anyone, sorry Mark.

The Celeron system had to be clocked back to 600 Mhz due to instability problems.  I am convinced that the problems are related to the poor quality clip on the Alpha cooler, there is definitely not much pressure on the cpu.  When I get the watercooler back on the Duron system - which is in redesign - the GlobalWin FOP-32/1 is going on the Celeron  That should solve the heat problem.  This system also got a DVD player along with the all-in-wonder and might get an IDE Zip drive if I can find any place for it, the case is completely filled up with peripherals.  There is not a spare bay in the whole system.  Also on the list for this system is another set of hard drives to handle the TV On-Demand files, but a case change will be in order.  I will have to take a look at some of the server cubes around, that should be able to handle all the components.

I made an attempt to set up a LINUX webserver using RedHat7.0.  What a disaster.  I don't know what I did, but I cannot seem to get even a text editor to open.  It looks like the install did not detect the ethernet adapters, and well, time to reformat the bastard and try again.  This time I will probably just do the 'basic' webserver install and go with that.  But that is for another time, next week is dissertation filing week.  Wish me luck.

Just wanted to check in, I am getting moved into the new abode and shaking out the new setup.  Same old equipment, but added some Klipsch THX 0.4-200 speakers to the big box, and all that I can say is DAMN, these speakers are clear, loud, sharp and just an excellent listen.  Watched a bit of MiB on the DVD/monitor last night, and all I can say is WOW.  

I also wanted to give out a short list of places to go for great bargains. These are the locations that I shop around at on a regular basis, you can get some great deals....

1. techbargins.com
2. anandtech hotdeals
3. techdeals.net
4. fatwallet
5. slickdeals.net

I use techbargins, anandtech and techdeals for most of my shopping, seems to work for me. Hasta

Wow, long time and no update.  Not much happening on the hardware front these days.  I got the duron800 up and running in a KT7-RAID board at 1000 MHz/1.8V with an FOP32 heatsink, not too bad for an $80 chip.  Slapped another 128 Mb RAM in the system and got rid of the old 5.1 Gb WD 5400 drive.  The HD got replaced with one of the IBM 10K 4.5 ms SCSI-3 HD's that I picked up a few weeks ago.  This thing just smokes!  Now that there are no IDE devices, disabling the IDE functions in the BIOS makes IRQ issues a thing of the past.  Been loving this thing.  Working on the dissertation full time these days, so there is little time for hardware tinkering recently.  Basically, it is time the get the hell out of this friggin place.

Been looking into wireless networking for the new house and it looks like I will be going with a mixture of hardwired 100T and 802.11b wireless.  I ordered an SMC7004WEP access point and PC card for my laptop to connect.  The SMC offered the best reviews, the hint of 128 bit encryption, plus it can act as a gateway/router for the ethernet and has a print server hooked up to it.  Although this is probably not the way it will be set up.  Network setup in the new place will be on a cable modem connected to my Linksys router, of which 2 ports will be dedicated to my server and my main workstation.  One other port will be attached to a hub via crossover to which my second workstation/DVD/home theater box and my printserver will be attached.  The last port on the Linksys router will be attached to the Access Point, which will also act as a printserver for the downstairs office and as a ethernet connection for the PC laptop that resides in that office.  Finally, there will be two systems on the airstation, my laptop and the existing tenents' Mac laptop, both of which should be able to connect to the internet seamlessly through this setup.  I am very concerned over the lack of security on the wireless network, so I am going to look at IPsec for encryption of all network traffic over the LAN.  Unfortunately the biggest hole will be the Mac, which can only run with ridiculously poor 40 bit encryption.  This will mandate secondary firewalls on all the systems with some pretty aggressive logging and detection techniques.  This is shaping up to be a real learning experience for me, and I am looking forward to trying this out....

On a side note, I ordered all the equipment this afternoon.  The plan is to hook up my current roommates DSL line to the Access Point, then connect both my workstation and my laptop via wireless to the network.  This is completely temporary situation until I get my dissertation completed and moved up to my new place.  This will require me buying a temporary PCI wireless card, which can be obtained from CompUSA for $199.  Once I move this PCI card will be completely unnecessary though, but I could just return it to CompUSA before the move, since I will only need it for a few weeks at the most.

I had better sign off, back to chapter 4.  Cheers!

Big scare over the weekend.  I moved from my house into some temporary housing while I finish writing my dissertation.  I got set up at the new place, fired up my big system and the damn thing was so flaky that it was crashing constantly.  I panicked on Sun night and ordered a 800 Mhz Duron, Asus K7V(?) and heatsink a new waterblock from DangerDen and just for the hell of it another 128 Mb RAM.  Anyway, I managed to get the system back up to a reasonable amount of stability, but I think that the capacitors running voltage control to the Slot A K7 have gone tits-up.  The funny thing is that the system is now only stable at 700 Mhz with 1.65V, not the 1.7V that it was using previously.  Very strange.  Also a nice change as the processor now runs 6-8C over ambient, not the 8-10C that it was doing previously.

I still have not sold anything on the hardware page, take a look.

Looking for hardware that I have for sale cheap? Look here (dead).

The best discussion on fans/voltages and how to's for fanbusses in the world is located here.

New drivers for the Intel chipsets available for your BX/ZX/LX/850iegrfesl based Intel motherboards.  Looks like they will work on any Intel board, from the very old to the newest 850i's.  After installing them on my server, I did not notice any difference, although it did re-detect all the motherboard hardware.  3DMARK2000 did not show any difference in numbers, still at 3086 on my Voodoo3/2000@166 Mhz.  You can find these new drivers from this location directly.  You can thank hot hardware for them too!  P.S., these are not on the Intel site yet therefor they should be considered beta, e.g. don't blame me or hot hardware if they hose yur system and spank your dog!

Nice - 6 hours for a Seti data block.  You have got to love 900 MHz!

Just a quick note.  Having a 600 Mhz Celeron-II lying around I got to thinking (smell the smoke?).  I originally posted on the techreport message boards about my inability to get this chip running on an ASUS P2B.  The guy who responded commented on his C-II 600 running 875 on an Abit BH rev 1 motherboard, so I asked him how he did it since my board is also rev 1.  Now, it is known that the Abit BH motherboard does not officially support the coppermine core, so I was more that just a little interested.  The response was that Abit does not "officially" support the coppermine, but most of the boards do in fact recognize the coppermine core if the QN BIOS is installed.  Since the system is a fresh build (2 weeks), the BIOS was already at QN, extra-special bonus!  Great, plugged the chip in, checked the jumpers on the Locket!!! and fired it up at 600 Mhz.  Fantastic, so what the heck, bumped the FSB to 100 Mhz and lowe and behold, 901 Mhz at 1.6V.  Getting better and better.  Ran Seti for about 5 min, crash.  Bumped the voltage up to 1.65V, 20 min of Seti and crash.  At 1.70V Seti has now been running for 27 hours straight, no crashes.

Unfortunately, this means that my Server is now faster than my workstation - what a waste.  Good news today though, AMD will officially release their AMD760 chipset on Monday, which supports DDR.  I guess that means that I need to start to order some watercooling stuff for socket A boards....

Note, if you are using a system that has SoftMenuII.  If you wish to overclock, you must first change the CPU detect from automatic to User Define then look for a line called 'Speed hold Error.' This is the automatic checking of CPU speed that the BIOS performs on bootup, if it is enabled you will not be able to overclock your system.  Upon system boot you will get a message like 'CPU Undefined or ...blah.'  Go back into the BIOS and change the Speed Hold Error setting to disabled and overclock away.

With this, I got the server Celeron366 back up to 550Mhz at 2.1V!  Yea!  I am stability testing right now with SETI, so far so good though.

I added a short set of links at the bottom of the page to places where I will put in articles that I have, well, stolen from other sites.  Since this site (mine) gets almost no traffic I see no problem. All the articles are fully referenced to the original authors.  I freely acknowledge that the material is not mine and is reproduced here only for my own future reference. 

At this time I have H₂O running in the K7.  It will run at 800 Mhz, but it is not very stable.  It runs all day at 750 Mhz, but I sometimes experience crashes when performing memory intensive applications.  Changing the CAS latency and timings did not make it any better.  The water block cools the cache chips too, so it is likely that the cache (3.6 ns) is the limiting factor here.  The K7 is a week 46 600 core K7-500 running on a K7M stepping 4 using a ninjamicros GFD for overclocking.   I am satisfied with it right now at 700 Mhz, so it will get left the way it is. 

I have made a switch array for my system using 2 DPDT and one TPDT center off switch.  They are rigged to run 7V or 12V or center off and are hooked up tp they run all the fans inside my system except the GeForce heatsink and the 60 mm YS Tech fan that is mounted over the videocard.  Both of those are set to run all the time.  LED's show voltage visually and I have spade couplings to a spade block set up to provide a central position for mounting all the fans connections.  The system runs 2-4C over ambient and the CPU 10C over ambient.  With the fans going full blast, the videocard is cooled an additional 10C and the system temp will drop to 2C over ambient.

My file server just got a major overhaul.  It started life as a K6-2/400 on an FIC503+ w/64 Mb ECC RAM in an old AT style case of no particular note.  The case was really poor, with almost no venting to the exterior, mandating cutting a hole in the side and mounting an 80 mm Sunon to blow some air into the system.

The case got ditched for a black Antec case KS280B from CompUSA (each). Two fans were mounted inside the case, a 120 mm sunon as intake in the front and an 80 mm sunon blowhole.  I wired a 5V/12V switch with LED's into the system and connected it to a Radio Shack project box and speaker connector.  The switch also is wired to provide 7v/12V to the second speaker connector, but at 7V the fans are too loud. The CPU was changed to a Celeron366@550 with an old alpha cooler on a Slocket!!!.  Storage is handled by a hacked Promise Fast Track IDE controller coupled to two IBM ATA-100 15 Gb 7200 RPM drives that I got from buy.com running raid 0 (striped) and an older WD8.1 Gb drive as the master.  The system is built on a Abit BH6 board with 128 Mb Infitron 6.5 ns memory from memman.  Video is taken care of with a Voodoo3-2000 and the remaining components are as follows; Netgear NIC, Monster MX300, Memorex CD-482E CD, standard floppy, cheapie speakers, Viewsonic E771 monitor and Belkin OmniPort SE-2 for multiple computer configurations when building systems.

Update: Oops, this thing is not the most stable at 550 Mhz, so I lowered it to 495 at default voltage and it is doing much better.  Still crapping out at this voltage, back to 366 until I get some time to mess with it.

Voltages are controlled by a single TPDT center off switch running 5 or 12V through a speaker block assembly that I am quite proud of.  If I had a camera, I would shoot some pix and show you how I did it, but for now go look at the links on the bottom of the page where you will find references on how to build the switches and assemblies.  The case is lined with Dynamat sound absorbent material, which works fairly well.  The main source of noise is the powersupply and the hard drives, but I am not willing to soft mount the HD's due to the possible degradation in actuator arm performance and the powersupply, well, I have no idea what to do about that.

I will update this some other time and turn this into a bit more of a how to page...  Right now I think that I will just post some tips here (so that I do not forget them).

Condensation Protection

I received an interesting e-mail a while back concerning waterproofing circuit boards. While I have not had the time to put this to use yet, it sounds like it might be just the thing to prevent condensation from doing a number on the sensitive electrical components when "going for the cold." The author chose to remain anonymous, but here is his e-mail, as written. 

"I have been reading some of the articles on your website and have a little information I would like to pass on regarding electrical insulation of printed circuit boards. You used polyurethane, which will work. However, the aircraft industry and the marine industry have been doing this sort of thing for years. We don't use polyurethane, as it can develop micro cracks as it ages (especially in elevated temperature or UV environments). We use silicone RTV. Normally, this product is procured in ready-to-use fashion by the quart or larger quantities and it is expensive. However, you can make your own quite easily. 

Get a large tube of clear silicone adhesive and cut it with a solvent (Xylene, Methyl Ethyl Ketone, or Acetone) till it has the consistency of house paint or a little thicker. Then just dip the card in the stuff and let it dry overnight. It will last something like 600 years, is impervious to UV, will not break down from heat (under 300 degrees F), and is not affected by acids or salts. DO NOT USE ANYTHING OTHER THAN CLEAR RTV!!! The colored stuff conducts electricity with white being the worst offender (full of titanium oxide). 

One thing about using tape to cover the contacts on the edges of the board. We have discovered that the simple act of pulling masking tape from a roll can and often does leave a static charge on the tape in excess of 6,000 volts. (You might want to stick the tape to the edge of your statically grounded work bench for a few minutes before you apply it to the board's contacts)." Even though I happen to be fresh out of Xylene and Methyl Ethyl Ketone, ( ;-) ) I do have acetone (which is easily obtainable at paint supply and home centers). It does do a nice job of thinning the silicone and the dried mixture is flexible and looks like it will do the trick. Thanks for the tip. 

Blatantly Ganked from Benchtest.com

Installing new hardware without reinstalling windows.

Open regedit and export the registry somewhere that you can get at it. I back mine up into C:\temp and then copy it onto another system for safekeeping. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE then delete the key Enum. Open msconfig and do a selective startup, deselecting all the items in the "load startup group items" group with the exception of the scanreg and systray. I would also recommend that you have all your hardware drivers and a copy of Win98SE unzipped in the C:\temp directory, which will stop you from having to hunt the files down. Reboot the system and it will redetect all the PnP items and motherboard resources. Then off you go. Remember, if you cannot find the file, try windows\system, windows\inf and windows\system32 - great places for files to hide. Good luck! Most problems are caused by running software that is linked to hardware, by not loading the software on the next bootup, many problems can be solved.

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